Category: Uncategorized
Assorted links
1. I have not yet been assimilated.
3. Ecological footprint feedback can discourage people.
5. Perception vs. reality in NBA ref bias, with reference to Pat Riley.
Assorted links
1. Watch markets in everything, why not just run faster?
3. The macro learned in economics grad school, though I disagree that ideology is the reason for RBC popularity.
4. Singapore allows political competition on the internet (1/20), ungated version here.
Assorted links
1. When should we tax goods with inelastic demand?
3. Will on the new Jerry Gaus book; Kevin Vallier’s summary is intended as positive, but it reflects my reservations about the book: “In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist.” Too much engagement with macro-positions of philosophic others, too many strung together, semi-empirical casual observations, not enough focused, narrowed down progress on the knotty particular problems of social choice and aggregation and whether rules are simply an arbitrary category. The argument takes on too many moving pieces — not quite empirical, not quite theoretical — in a way which is to this reader was not persuasive.
In my pile
1. Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Best Kitchens on Wheels, by Heather Shouse. I’ve read enough of this book to know it is true to its title.
2. The Moral Lives of Animals, by Dale Peterson. It looks like Adam Smith’s TMS applied to the moral sense of non-human animals, making the point that the moral sense is not unique to human beings.
3. Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser.
4. Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; so far I love it, imagine a mix of Raymond Chandler, near-future science fiction, and South African grit.
All are worthy of purchase, we will see how they develop. I found The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, the most enjoyable science fiction novel I’ve read in a few years, and it should appeal to fans of Thailand too.
The AV (alternative vote) electoral reforms
The UK is voting on this today. Here is a good survey of social choice approaches to the question, and here is a survey of how AV systems work. The basics are this:
Alternative vote (AV) is a type of preferential voting in which voters are asked to rank the candidates from first to last. The basic idea is that if no candidate is the first choice of 50% + 1 voters, then the candidate who received the fewest first place votes is eliminated. This candidate’s voters then have their votes reallocated to the candidate they ranked second. This reallocation process continues until one candidate achieves 50% + 1 votes (more on this later).
Too often the social choice approaches focus on the formal properties of the voting and do not capture the actual political incentives of electoral systems, which tend to follow from imperfect information and the behavioral tendencies of voters. In this case the key change is that competition for votes becomes messier and less clearly linked to major party identities.
A long time ago I wrote this analysis of related (but not always identical) systems:
Electoral systems based upon the single transferable vote tend to produce the
following effects:
• voters can express preferences for more than simply their favourite candidate
or party;
• representatives are focused towards constituency service and district policies,
rather than national policies;
• political parties are weak, non-ideological, and subject to frequent infighting;
• the ability of the legislature to check the executive is weak;
• most voters are confused by the mechanics of the single transferable vote;
and
• sophisticated voters have an incentive to manipulate the system and vote an
order which is not their true preference.
That is followed by a much more detailed analysis, scroll to p.56 for more. At best such systems are workable, but it is hard to see why they should bring any major advantages.
Assorted links
The culture that is Japan there is no great stagnation
Japanese invent a box that can simulate a kiss over the Internet:
The device looks like an ordinary box attached to a computer with a rotating straw. A closer look reveals otherwise. Students at Japan’s Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications have created a small device that uses motor rotations with the aim to simulate the feeling of a kiss over the Internet. Warning: this might be the most disturbing thing you’ll see today.
Upon closer inspection, we learn that the kissing device responds directly to a person’s tongue. On one end, a person rotates the “straw” in one direction and the “straw” on the other end will rotate in the same direction. The result is a powerful tactile response that feels like you’re giving or receiving a kiss. From the demonstration video, the device looks a lot more effective than that concept cellphone that uses a wet sponge to transmit moisture onto a person’s lips.
For the device’s creators at Kajimoto Laboratory, the kissing device has a lot of potential, “The elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing, and the moistness of the tongue…
But where is the demonstration video? Can you find it on the site or elsewhere?
For the pointer I thank Natalie B.
Secrecy markets in everything how to know you are living next door to OBL edition
The neighbor said if local children kicked a ball into the compound, someone from inside would pay the children for the ball rather than let them step onto the grounds.
From CNN, via MonkeyCage.
From the comments: “Not surprisingly, the kids understood incentives. The lead audio report now on the NYT says that the kids would be given 50 rupees (about $1.12 USD according to x-rates.com) and that they would therefore repeatedly kick the ball over the fence.”
Assorted links
Assorted links
*Pakistan: A Hard Country*
That is the new and excellent book by Anatol Lieven, and there is now more reason than ever to read it. Here are a few things I learned from the book:
1. For most of the years since 1947, Pakistan has had higher economic growth rates than did India. Pakistan does not have the same pockets of extreme poverty, or for that matter the extreme wealth. The level of economic equality in Pakistan is relatively high.
2. Charitable donations run almost five percent of gdp, one of the highest percentages in the world and this reflects the emphasis on alms-giving in Islam.
3. A good quotation from a businessmen: “One of the main problems for Pakistan is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats.”
4. Agriculture pays virtually no tax and the government lends lots of money to businesses and doesn’t seriously ask for it back. As a result Pakistan collects far less revenue than does India, even comparing areas of comparable per capita income. If Pakistan were a state of India, it still would be considerably richer per capita than India’s poorest regions, such as Bihar.
5. The Pakistani state is nonetheless a lot more stable than most people think. In part this is because of the conservative structure of kinship and landholder power in the country.
6. The main threats to the future of Pakistan have to do with ecology and water, not politics.
7. The end of the book has a very interesting discussion about how U.S. actions in Pakistan affect different coalitions, feelings of humiliation, relative status relationships, etc.
Definitely recommended, as are Lieven’s books on the Baltics and Ukraine.
Osama bin Laden is dead
My quick take is that that Obama will be re-elected (getting Osama is way more important than Iraq or Saddam in the American mind, attacks on American soil, etc.), at this point the Republicans won’t try to beat him from the center and will thus nominate a more extreme candidate and lose badly, and the most important effects will be on Pakistan, not this country.
What do you think?
p.s. Check out this photo.
Childhood memories
Alex’s post brought back some childhood memories. At school, in sixth and seventh grade, we played a game called “Bombardment,” where you wailed the ball at the other kid’s head, as hard as you could. If a kid shied away from the ball, the gym teacher laughed at him.
After school, there was a game called, appropriately, “Kill the guy”; now it’s an on-line game.
I played Little League for seven years. One day during practice I was in the outfield and I missed a catch and the ball smashed into my eye. It hurt! And it bruised. I sat down for a while but was back out on the field for the next session. I didn’t go home and no one called my mother. The coach asked “Are you OK?”
One day a poor girl in the Girl Scouts was walking around and selling cookies, when a young man lured her into his house and raped and killed her, a few blocks from our house in Hillsdale. They organized a Frankenstein-like village hunt, found the girl’s body, and traced it back to the guy, who was sent to jail and remains there to this day. This didn’t change any of the local norms.
Maybe it’s still all like this, I cannot say.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything: treehouses for grown-ups.
2. Medicare bonuses will soon be based in part on patient satisfaction.
3. Interview with a nine-year-old autistic boy.
4. “Elementary, my dear Watson…!”
5. Another selfish reason to have kids (1/20 but worth it I think).
Did Keynes favor planning?
Barkley Rosser and Brad DeLong say no, but it depends on definition and context. Barkley tries to talk his way out of it, but Keynes in the General Theory did advocate “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment.” “somewhat” — that’s my kind of weasel word! In any case this was not the same as classical central planning circa 1920, but in a rap video I consider that acceptable license. By my count “central plan” comes up once in a ten-minute video and most importantly Keynes does not accept the characterization but rather responds that the debate is about spending. The video is not suggesting that each and every rapped point is true at face value, and if the two characters seem to debate past one another that too reflects the reality at the time.
Also consider another piece of evidence, namely the Keynes-approved preface to the German-language (uh-oh) edition of the General Theory:
Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.
Points in response are: a) Keynes does not seem to actually favor the German system, even if he thinks it is better suited to Keynesian doctrine, b) the Nazi system was not “central planning,” and c) this was written in 1936 before the worst acts of the Nazi state, planning or otherwise.
Nonetheless, in Keynes’s time enthusiasm for significant socialistic planning was common. Keynes had it too, at least for a while in the 1930s. It was a milder planning than the worst ideas circulating at the time, but it’s fair game to contrast it with the anti-planning sentiments of Hayek. Can you imagine Hayek writing a preface like that? I don’t think so.