Results for “self-recommending” 168 found
Assorted links
1. Last words of crashing airline crews.
2. David Brooks’s Sidney awards part II.
3. What went wrong with the Bush tax cuts? (pdf)
4. I wouldn’t label a university “D+” either, with an update from UC Berkeley as well.
5. Remix your own Philip Glass compositions.
6. Emily Oster is now on Twitter, self-recommending.
*India’s Tryst with Destiny*
The authors are Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya and it is the new book on the contemporary Indian economy. Self-recommending and absolutely excellent, full of useful details. It is not yet on U.S. Amazon, but it is available in India and perhaps elsewhere.
Assorted links
1. Erik Voeten with some remarks toward a theory of treaties.
2. Milton Friedman on the popularity of the Fed.
3. What V.S. Naipaul thinks of Jane Austen.
4. New paper on Albert Hirschman and the World Bank, and Rajiv Sethi on Hirschman.
5. Further skepticism on productivity increases in U.S. manufacturing.
6. Raj Chetty video lectures on taxes and redistribution, not viewed but self-recommending.
Baumol’s new book on the cost disease
It is self-recommending, here are a few points of relevance:
1. There has been a clear cost disease in most kinds of education and many kinds of medicine, but I blame institutions and laws as much as the intrinsic nature of the product.
2. I do not see the arts as subject to the cost disease very much at all. As for the “live performing arts,” the disease seems to afflict the older and less innovative sectors, such as opera and the symphony. There is plenty of live music these days, it is offered in innovative ways, and much of it is free.
3. Even “the live performing arts” can be broken down into underlying characteristics, many of which show a great deal of recent innovation. For instance the supply of “musical immediacy” has been non-stagnant through YouTube, which often gives you a better glimpse of the performer than you get through nosebleed seats and giant screens. YouTube isn’t “live,” but there is no particular reason to break down the analysis at that level and certainly it is not a sacred category for consumers.
4. In many sectors of the arts, especially music, consumers demand constant turnover of product. Old music becomes “obsolete” — for whatever sociological reasons — and in this sense the sector is creating lots of new value every year. From an “objectivist” point of view they are still strumming guitars with the same speed, but from a subjectivist point of view — the relevant one for the economist – they are remarkably innovative all the time in the battle against obsolescence. A lot of the cost disease argument is actually an aesthetic objection that the art forms which have already peaked — such as Mozart — sometimes have a hard time holding their ground in terms of cost and innovation.
5. In general “cost disease” sectors do not remain constant over time. Agriculture has been unusually stagnant for the last twenty or so years, but it is hardly obvious that this trend will continue for the next century to come and it certainly was not the case for the period 1948-1990, quite the contrary.
6. The stagnancy of one sector may depend on the stagnancy of other sectors in non-transparent ways. “Live music” may seem like it doesn’t change much, but lifting the embargo on Cuba would boost the quantity and quality of my consumption of spectacular concert experiences, as would a non-stop flight to Haiti.
You can buy the book here.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.
Singapore R&D there is no great stagnation
Here is one description (with photo and a very good video):
Unveiled at a design conference in the UK recently, Kissenger is basically an egg-like orb outfitted with two soft plastic lips packed with sensors and actuators. When a human on one end of the kiss transaction plants a kiss on the robot lips, the sensors record the shape changes the kisser creates on the lips and translates those pressure patterns into a mirror image that can be beamed over the Web to another Kissenger. That Kissenger then reproduces the sender’s unique kiss for a human on the other end.
Here is another:
Kissing Bot. Singaporean robotics studio Lovotics has a new robot in the news. Kissenger is an advanced and intimate form of telepresence robot specially designed to transmit the senstions of a kiss. Two units are able to record and remotely reproduce the unique pressure sensations from a kiss … although the design looks pretty chaste and seems to lack an option to go French. Research like this while seeming silly is crucial for innovating next-gen avatar robot tech.
Here is more. Hat tip goes to @GrishinRobotics.
Self-recommending!
#tylertweets
Tyler’s twitter account was hacked yesterday for the most pedestrian of motives:
An amazing new weight loss product! It worked for me and I didnt even change my diet! [link redacted]
— tylercowen (@tylercowen) May 31, 2012
Justin Wolfers tweeted that this was rather unimaginative and following a challenge from Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour a new meme was born, #tylertweets. First the honorable mentions:
Although gas station tacos are generally excellent you should never get carnitas at a gas station that has clean squeegee water #tylertweets
— Gabriel Rossman @GabrielRossman#tylertweets New in my pile: “50 Shades of Grey”. Self-recommending.
— Robert Guico @lpangelrob
@ModeledBehavior truly rose to the challenge:
Its hard to imagine spoons will exist in their current form in 30 years. What does this tell us about the social discount rate? #tylertweets
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
Given what we know about the money illusion, should the moon be destroyed or doubled? The answer is not clear to me. #tylertweets
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
#tylertweets cannibalism is wrong, but not for the reasons it’s critics say. We ignore the wisdom of cannibals at our peril.
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
#tylertweets careful viewers will note Big Momma’s House 3 is biting satire of modern central banking. Most underappreciated drama of 2011?
— Modeled Behavior (@ModeledBehavior)
Lunch with Scott Sumner (and others) at China Star
How is that for self-recommending? Here in a short paragraph is my current take on where Ben Bernanke would differ from Scott. As the shadow banking system was imploding in 2008, due to a downward revaluation of collateral, nominal gdp stabilization would have required that the Fed resort to the medium of currency printing on a very large scale. Scott favors such a move. Bernanke would worry that the collapse of (some) intermediation would mean you get most of the output losses anyway, while the printing of currency would create subsequent problems with management of expectations, relative sectoral shocks (currency is only a partial substitute for credit), and medium-term adjustment once the smoke has cleared, not to mention political relations with Congress and interest groups within the Fed system itself. Therefore Bernanke didn’t want to do it, even though in principle he likes to see nominal gdp stabilized, and has written and said as such.
I am not suggesting that Scott agrees with this perspective.
*The Rent is Too Damn High*
The new eBook from Matt Yglesias is out today, I will likely read (and finish!) my copy tonight. Self-recommending, you can get one here.
Follow Acemoglu and Robinson on Twitter
Self-recommending, @WhyNationsFail.
Can “education as signaling” models explain recent changes in labor markets?
Acemoglu and Autor present a few non-controversial stylized facts about labor markets, including falling wages of low-skill workers, flattening of the wage premium for workers with less education than college completion, non-monotone shifts in inequality, polarization of employment in advanced economies, and skill-replacing technologies (and don’t forget the new Brynjolfsson and MacAfee book; it is important).
The simplest model is that, because of information technology, employers demand more skills. The job market responds accordingly, and eventually the education system responds too. The major shifts are driven by changing productivities of human capital, and that is one reason why the human capital model of labor markets has proven so robust. It accounts (mostly) for the big changes in labor market returns.
What would a signalling model predict as the results of skill-biased technical change? I am never sure. Those models are tricky with comparative statics predictions for at least three reasons:
1. Multiple equilibria are common and arguably essential,
2. It is assumed that employers cannot in the short run (medium run?) observe the marginal products of workers, and
3. The (supposed) relevant factor for employers, the degree, is past history and, if not quite carved in stone, credentialed retraining remains the exception in many market segments. It hardly drives wage outcomes or observed changes in wages.
The simplest (non-signaling) model is that wages follow MP, albeit with some lag, and adjusting for a suitably sophisticated notion of marginal revenue product, including morale effects on other workers.
Again, how should skill-based technical change matter in a signaling model? In the model, no employer observes (across what time horizon?) that the MPs of some workers have gone up and that other workers’ MPs have gone down. Yet it seems that changing MPs matter at margins. And if employers can sniff out changing MPs, this implies they can sniff out large MP differences more generally, which limits the scope of educational signaling.
It is a strong result these days that occupation and also job tasks predict earnings better than before (see pp.26-27 in the first link), including relative to level of education. That also seems to run counter to what signaling theories predict. Most likely we are now better at measuring the quality of workers and their educational signals don’t matter as much as they used to. The higher returns to post-secondary education, which account for most of the recent growth in the returns to college degrees (p.145 and thereabouts), are skill-based and they are tightly connected to occupation and job tasks.
These are all reasons why the signaling model for education is not growing in popularity, namely that it does not speak well to current comparative statics and to the current big stories in labor markets.
It is an embarrassing question for signaling models to ask: with what lag do employers get a good estimate of a worker’s marginal product? If you say “it takes 37 years” it is hard to account for all the recent changes in wage rates in response to technology, as discussed above.
Alternatively, let’s say the lag is two years. There are several RCT estimates of the return to education, based on earnings profiles measured over twenty or thirty year periods. The estimated returns to education are high, and if those returns were just signaling-based you would expect the IV-elevated individuals to show up as underskilled and for the credentials-based wage gains to fall away with a few years’ time. That doesn’t happen (if you are wondering, the IV-elevated individuals are those who for essentially random reasons end up getting more education, or an instrumental variable proxies as such, without the elevation being correlated with their underlying quality as workers,).
In other words, the signaling model is caught between two core results — high long-term measured returns to the education of IV-elevated individuals, and technology drives wage changes in the medium-term. It is hard for a signaling model to explain both of those changes at the same time.
There is a way to nest signaling models within human capital models, rather than viewing them as competing hypotheses. Using matching theories, let’s say employers learn the quality of workers they have, but find it hard to estimate the quality of workers they don’t have. IV-elevated workers can’t fool the market/the employer for very long, and so their high pecuniary returns from education really do measure productivity gains. Nonetheless there can be undervalued “diamonds in the rough.” Think of them as geniuses, or at least good workers, who hate getting the education.
From the point of view of these students (or dropouts, as the case may be), the signaling model will appear to be true. They will resent the education and they won’t need the education. If it is costly enough to sample worker quality from the “outsiders bin,” it will remain an equilibrium that a degree is required to get the job, at least provided workers of this kind are not too numerous. If there were “lots and lots” of such workers, more employers would scrounge around in the outsider’s bin. In other words, the anecdotal evidence for signaling fits into a broader model precisely because such cases aren’t too common.
What I’ve been reading
1. Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, Part 1: 1973-1985, by Garry Kasparov. Self-recommending! His chess books are full of history, drama, and suspense, in addition to the chess, he is simply a great mind.
2. Michael Krondl, Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert. The best book I know on the history of dessert, with plenty of information on India, my personal favorite dessert country. There is also the short and useful Bread: A Global History, by William Rubel.
3. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain. Written in the 1940s, published in the late 70s, ignored, just republished. It’s like reading a poem. The Guardian is on the mark to call it “The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.”
4. Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture 1931-1941. A revisionist take which portrays the culture of the era as about more than just about communism, in any case thought provoking.
5. Peter Conrad, Verdi And/Or Wagner. A multifaceted comparison of the two composers, integrating music, politics, and history, readable and recommended.
6. William A. Barnett, Getting it Wrong: How Faulty Monetary Statistics Undermine the Fed, the Financial System, and the Economy. He pushes his own work on Divisia monetar aggregates, although Scott Sumner will tell you that a steely focus on nominal gdp will suffice.
7. David Mikics, Who Was Jacques Derrida? Recommended by Gordon, this book is a good intelligent and intelligible introduction to Derrida.
8. Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station. So good (and short) that I read it twice in a row, it is a mock of “creative” slackers who decide they wish to live abroad. One of my favorite novels of the year.
In my pile of review copies are Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make, and Paula Stephan, How Economics Shapes Science.
*Why Nations Fail*
The authors are Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson and the subtitle is The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Could there be a better and more up to date book on the importance of economic institutions? Self-recommending! Excerpt:
[In Russia] Opposition to railways accompanied opposition to industry, exactly as in Austria-Hungary. Before 1842 there was only one railway in Russia. This was the Tsarskoe Selo railway, which ran seventeen miles from St. Petersburg to the imperial residencies of Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. Just as Kankrin opposed industry, he saw no reason to promote railways, which he argued would bring a socially dangerous mobility, noting that “Railways do not always result from natural necessity, but are more an object of artificial need or luxury. They encourage unnecessary travel from place to place, which is entirely typical of our time.”
This book has literally hundreds of good examples of how to apply institutional economics and property rights theory to economic history.
If I have a worry about the book, it is this. I do not disagree with the claims about institutions. But I am less sure that Acemoglu and Robinson dispose of the more “fundamentalist” theories, which might invoke say geography or other pre-institutional factors behind economic growth, political change, or for that matter levels of interpersonal trust. Where exactly do the institutional changes come from? They seem to come from other institutional changes (see p.209 for one example of many), elephants all the way down. I would have chosen the alternative subtitle: “Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Everything but the Origins.” That’s still a lot.
The book is due out March 20.
What I’ve been reading
1. Habibi, by Craig Thompson. I don’t enjoy most graphic novels, but this is my favorite of the ones I’ve read.
2. Roger Farmer, “The Stock Market Crash of 2008 Caused the Great Recession: Theory and Evidence.” I don’t agree with every part of the model, but it focuses our attention on what has become the #1 question of the American macroeconomy: to what extent can a boost in nominal flow make up for a shortfall in wealth?
3. Robert Levine, Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. An important book in cultural economics, this clear, energetically written tract is perhaps the best critique of where our culture is at today. It’s about parasitism more generally, not just copyright violation. Everyone who follows cultural economics should read this book.
4. Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies, home page here. The second part of a three-volume series on the history of American energy, told through the distinction between productive and predatory capitalism. Bradley is a very much underrated economic historian, largely because of his “amateur” status, but there is a remarkable amount of learning in his books..
5. Douglas A. Irwin, Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s, self-recommending. Another new and self-recommending book is Mark Miller’s Salsas of the World, he is one of my cooking and restaurant heroes.
What I’ve been reading
1. Red April (Abril Rojo], by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman. This Peruvian “Shining Path noir” tale is as good as the strongly positive reviews indicate and it has an excellent dark humor. Here is an interview with the author.
2. Effi Briest, by Theodor Fontane. Remarkably vivid and full of life, despite its reputation as a stodgy 19th century novel. It also can be funny and very much to the point about human nature.
3. Made in Britain, by Evan Davis. Too simple for my tastes, but this is nonetheless an effective accounting of where the British economy remains strong and also where the weaknesses are starting to bite. The author has a good understanding of economics and he avoids the mercantilism that you might fear is implicit in such an enterprise.
4. Hart Crane, The Bridge. Two-thirds of this is stunning, mostly the first half and most of what comes after “Three Songs.” Plus it’s fairly short and easy to read, though difficult to comprehend at the highest levels. Think of it as the next step after Leaves of Grass.
5. Popular Crime, by Bill James. Silly idea, or self-recommending? Perhaps a bit of both, because this is the Bill James, writing a 500-page treatise on popular crimes and also on other people’s books on popular crimes. The classic error detection and pattern recognition skills are still there. The bottom line is that a) I finished it (skimmed maybe a fifth, some of the cases I didn’t care about), and b) I liked it increasingly as my read progressed, and c) I have no trouble with books which fall outside of the usual “central narrative” structure but you might. If you think you might like it, at the very least try it. That said, if you’re looking to pick holes in it, you certainly can; here is one critical review. Here is another review.
6. Javier Marias, A Heart so White. Loved it, a modern classic by Spain’s leading writer.
Tim Harford’s *Adapt*
Tim is probably the single best economist to follow on Twitter, arguably today’s best active popular economics writer, and now I have in my hands his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. Self-recommending! (If page one is good, should I worry about the rest of the book?)