Saturday assorted links
1. Should they release wild elephants in Denmark? And sharks have distinct personalities.
2. A claim that neither assortative mating nor dysgenics have increased in genetic importance.
3. Who is the most famous athlete in the world?
4. New Charles Kenny book manuscript “The Plague Cycle.”
5. Goethe and the second price auction. And probabilistic grading for true-false exams.
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74. Given the great love and honor shown to him since carrying the Olympic Torch at the Atlanta games in 1996 and being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George Bush in 2005 it is perhaps difficult to remember how reviled he was in the 1960s after he converted to Islam, changed his name, and refused to be drafted.
David Susskind, the well regarded television producer and talk show host, said this to Ali in a bitter exchange in 1968:
I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He is a simplistic fool and a pawn.
We should remember these things, however, because more than Ali’s courage in the ring, it was Ali’s courage in fighting the US government and much of the US public that made him a great American.
Model this, show your work
Here is the larger photo set, via Michelle Dawson.
How to fix London real estate problems
James Jirtle writes to me:
I am a long-time reader of your blog (and your books!) and hugely enjoyed your recent interview with Camille Paglia.
I was wondering whether you might consider writing a post about potential policy responses to the housing crises in many major cities, perhaps nowhere as acute as in London where I live.
London is a bit of a perfect storm: (i) restrictive planning regimes, preventing the building of new homes; (ii) a strictly-enforced “green belt”, limiting the physical expansion of the city; and (iii) huge inflows of both people and capital (both foreign and domestic, in the form of buy-to-let investors) driving up demand.
The average London house price passed £500,000 last November (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/house-prices/11959731/Average-London-house-price-hits-500000-as-capitals-housing-market-shows-no-sign-of-losing-steam.html) and average rents for a 1-bedroom flat now exceed £700/month (http://www.workgateways.com/working-in-the-uk/cost-of-living).
Various policy responses have been proposed, including:
- raising stamp duty (tax on the purchase of a home – the UK government recently raised rates on homes worth more than £500,000, and introduced punitive rates on purchases of second homes);
- raising council tax (property tax – where a property is rented, this is paid by the tenants);
- “bedroom taxes” on unused bedrooms (currently in place for social housing);
- increasing taxes on private landlords (the UK government recently removed the ability of landlords to deduct mortgage interest, and capped deductions for repairs);
- loosening planning restrictions and taking other actions to combat NIMBYism;
- building on the green belt;
- deposit assistance for first-time buyers (the UK government currently underwrites mortgages of up to 95% LTV for first-time buyers for properties worth up to £600,000 and has introduced savings accounts where the government adds 25% to savings used to purchase a new home, contributing up to £3,000);
- punitive taxes on unused planning permission;
- direct price controls;
- restrictions on foreign ownership of property; and
- increasing interest rates.
Which of these (if any) do you think are likely to be effective? Are there other policies which might be beneficial that I haven’t listed? Politicians here have spent a lot of time bemoaning the crisis, but I don’t have much confidence that the solutions currently being proposed are likely to help. Ideally, I think the goal should be to enable those who live and work in the city to live in reasonable, affordable comfort without causing those currently on the housing ladder to lose significant amounts of money. But maybe we’re already beyond the point where that’s possible?
TC: I say we are probably beyond the point of fixing it, though marginal improvements surely are possible. Here is a good feature story by The Economist on the problem.
Does tenure encourage risk-taking?
It seems not, here is the new paper from Brogaard, Engelberg and van Wesep:
Using a sample of all academics that pass through top 50 economics and finance departments between 1996 and 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion that are “home runs” peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns holds for elite (top 10) institutions, for faculty with longer tenure cycles, and for promotion to Full Professorship. We find the opposite pattern among poorly-cited publications: their numbers steadily rise after tenure. The decline in both the quantity and quality of publications points to tenure incentivizing less effort in publishing rather than more risk-taking.
I am not surprised to read this result. I consider the “wasting of tenure” to be one of the aesthetic crimes one can commit with a wealthy life, and yet I see it all the time.
For the pointer I thank the excellent — and untenured — Kevin Lewis.
Addendum: Kevin comments.
Friday assorted links
2. The gig economy seems to drive out some lower quality entrepreneurship.
3. The new Mercatus state fiscal rankings — the Northeast does poorly.
4. No one will read David Mitchell’s new book for another one hundred years. I believe his fiscal ranking is pretty good.
5. The dangerous Japanese log-moving festival.
6. Why has the United States produced so few truly good soccer players? And debates over grit.
Intimate Partner Violence in the Great Recession
That is a recent paper from Schneider, Harknett, and Mclanahan (pdf), here is the abstract:
In the United States, the Great Recession has been marked by severe negative shocks to labor market conditions. In this study, we combine longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with Bureau of Labor Statistics data on local area unemployment rates to examine the relationship between adverse labor market conditions and intimate partner violence between 1999 and 2010. We find that rapidly worsening labor market conditions are associated with increases in the prevalence of violent/controlling behavior in marriage. These effects are most pronounced among whites and those with at least some post-secondary education. Worsening economic conditions significantly increase the risk that white mothers and more educated mothers will be in violent/controlling marriages rather than high quality marital unions.
Why was the American populist backlash so long in coming?
Bob Davis asks that question. I can think of a few hypotheses, none well-grounded:
1. It was first necessary for America to recover from recession, so people could be less scared, thus feeling sufficiently secure to go a bit crazy.
2. Rising expectations are required to sustain a backlash, and finally the economy was strong enough to deliver some of those. This mechanism was discussed by Tocqueville in his book on the French Ancien Regime. Of course this is a close cousin of #1.
3. Obama actually has been a towering and calming presence. But after him…the deluge.
4. The “Great Man Theory of Trump.” He has unique skills, and an unusual celebrity background, and the relevant variable is when he chose to actually run for President.
5. The institutional and intellectual capital of the Republican Party was finally run totally into the ground. (But when exactly? And who perceived it as such other than Democrats?)
6. Americans have been paying closer attention to the terror attacks and refugee crisis in Europe than we traditionally might think, and thus they feel that the American system requires a radical wake-up call.
7. Traditional white males approached some kind of threshold where they realized from now on they will lose all political battles unless kind of radical rebellion is undertaken. This hypothesis reminds me somewhat of the South’s decision to secede shortly before the Civil War.
8. Social media are more potent, and that helps populist sentiment, but populism isn’t actually any more popular these days (see Krugman, who notes Obama has fairly high approval ratings).
9. Noise.
These are just food for thought, I am not endorsing any of them. And for the most part they are not mutually exclusive.
The culture and polity that is Washington sentences to ponder
The ride-hailing group [Uber] is smarting over guidelines that let government workers recoup transport costs such as “feeding and stabling horses” but do not appear to permit claims for taking an Uber.
Here is the Barney Jopson FT article. It remains to be seen whether or not the regulations will be changed.
Intuitions about commodification are culturally relativistic
A non-relative male paying for a meal was once so anomalous that it was considered — and not always incorrectly — prostitution, says Moira Weigel, a Yale University PhD student and the author of the just-published “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating,” with police officers staking out bars and restaurants and even arresting daters.
That is from Emma Court. See also Jason Brennan.
Thursday assorted links
1. Joshua Gans on adult coloring books.
2. Michelin will start rating D.C. restaurants. They will have to grade on a curve.
3. Are publishers making a mistake by pursuing scale?
4. Which country has the most critical tourists in on-line forums?, the culture that is South Korea. Click the link to see the runners-up.
5. Congratulations to Chris Blattman, who is getting tenure at the University of Chicago.
6. For which embargoed government statistics are there information leaks into financial markets? FOMC no.
7. How would “Medicare for more” interact with the ACA? (NYT, very good piece)
Open and Closed India
In an interview the LSE’s distinguished economic historian Tirthankar Roy was asked how his work on colonial India informs our understanding of contemporary India.
What was similar between the colonial times and the post-reform years? The answer is openness. The parallel tells us that openness to trade and investment is good for capitalism, whether we consider the colonial times or the postcolonial. The open economy did not deliver capitalistic growth in the same fashion in both eras. But there were similarities. In both the periods, not only commodities but also capital and labour were mobile, which encouraged freer flow of knowledge, skills, and technology, and created incentives for domestic producers to become better at what they were doing.
…It is necessary to stress the lesson that open markets and cosmopolitanism were good for the Indian economy, because the political rhetoric in India remains trapped in nationalism, which tends to blame global trade and global capital for poverty and underdevelopment. That sentiment started as a criticism of the British Raj, nurtured by the left, and the negativity persists. The pessimistic view of openness is based on a misreading of economic history. There were many things seriously wrong with the British Raj, but market-integration was not one of these. Influenced by a wrong reading of history, India’s politics remains unnecessarily suspicious of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.
For evidence of rhetoric trapped in nationalism look no further than the Indian government’s refusal to allow Apple to sell used iPhones in India.
Hat tip: Pseudoerasmus on twitter.
Is Indian fertility collapsing?
From Sanjeev Sanyal:
The TFR for rural areas stands at 2.5, but that for urban India is down at 1.8 — marginally below the readings for Britain and the US. An important implication of this is that India’s overall TFR will almost certainly fall below replacement as it rapidly urbanises over the next 20 years.
There continue to be wide variations in the fertility rates across the country. Readings for the southern states have been low for some time, but are now dropping sharply in many northern states.
Tamil Nadu has a TFR of 1.7 but so do Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar continue to have the country’s highest TFR at 3.1 and 3.5 respectively, but these are also falling steadily.
Demise of the Bhadralok Interestingly, West Bengal has the lowest fertility in the country with a TFR reading of 1.6. The level for rural Bengal is 1.8 but is a shockingly low 1.2 for the cities. This is one of the lowest levels in the world and is at par with Singapore and South Korea.
Do read the whole thing. The net Indian TFR is about 2.3, which given gender imbalance and infant and child mortality is already about replacement rate.
How will talking bots affect us?
I have a short New Yorker piece on that question, here is one bit from it:
If Siri is sometimes sarcastic, could heavy users of the Siri of the future become a little more sarcastic, too?
For companies, there are risks associated with such widespread personification. For a time, consumers may be lulled by conversational products into increased intimacy and loyalty. But, later, they may feel especially betrayed by products they’ve come to think of as friends. Like politicians, who build up trust by acting like members of the family only to incur wrath when they are revealed to be careerist and self-interested, companies may find themselves on an emotional roller coaster. They’ll also have to deal with complicated subjects like politics. Recently, Tay, a chat bot from Microsoft, had to be disabled because it began issuing tweets with Nazi-like rhetoric. According to Elizabeth Dwoskin, in the Post, Cortana, another talking Microsoft bot, was carefully programmed not to express favoritism for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. A product’s apparent intelligence makes it likable, but also offers more of an opportunity to offend.
Here is another:
And there are ways in which just knowing that bots exist will change us. If the bots are good enough, we won’t be able to distinguish them from actual people over e-mail or text; when you get an e-mail, you won’t necessarily be certain it’s from a human being. When your best friend writes that she’s also “looking forward to seeing you at the baseball game tonight,” you’ll smile—then wonder if she’s busy and has asked her e-mail bot to send appropriate replies. Once everyone realizes that there might not be a person on the other end, peremptory behavior online may become more common. We’ll likely learn to treat bots more like people. But, in the process, we may end up treating people more like bots.
Do read the whole thing.
What I’ve been reading
1. Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.
2. China Miéville, Embassytown. The first of his novels that has clicked with me, perhaps because it is the one that comes closest to being a true novel of ideas, Heideggerian ideas in this case. A new prophecy is needed, and the nature of the new prophecy, like the old, will be shaped by language. Just accept that upon your first reading you won’t enjoy the first one hundred pages and you should at some point go back and read them again.
3. Yuri Herrara, Signs Preceding the End of the World. Sometimes considered Mexico’s greatest active writer, this novella draws upon the Juan Rulfo-Dante-Dia de los muertos tradition to create a convincing moral universe in 128 pages. I find this more vivid and arresting than Cormac McCarthy’s treatment of the other side of the border.
4. The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This book filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, plus it is engaging to read. Overall it confirmed my impression of major advances in the science, but not matched by many medical products for general use.
The other books I read weren’t as good as these.