Scream it from the rooftops (all in one breath)
Gary Burtless writes:
Instead of subsidizing low-wage employers, most [government] assistance programs reduce the availability of low-skill adults who are willing to work for low pay and lousy benefits. By shrinking the pool of workers willing to take the worst jobs, the programs tend to push up rather than push down wages at the bottom of the pay scale. Low-wage employers do not receive an indirect subsidy from the programs. Many must pay somewhat higher wages or recruit more intensively to fill their job vacancies.
There is much more at the link, including a considerations of programs which are an exception to this generalization, such as EITC.
Yunnan notes
In the summer, up to half of a multi-course meal may consist of mushrooms, the best I have had. Fried goat cheese is served, and the ham exceeds that of Spain in quality. I had not thought that buckwheat flour pizza, dipped in fresh honey, would be a staple in Chinese food. There is also flower soup of numerous kinds, corn dishes, pumpkin, and donkey.
Even the largest city in Yunnan — Kunming — has fresh air, a rarity in China. The weather is perfect year round, and the faces have Burmese, Tibetan, Thai, and Mongolian features. About one third of the population is explicitly classified as “ethnic minority,” and most of the others look like a blend with Han Chinese.
Dali, the second largest city, is nestled into a lake and mountains as a Swiss city might be. You could explore the neighboring villages around the lake for months. I recommend Xizhou, stay at Linden Centre.
The population is pro-American, not always the case in China, and the Flying Tigers, who flew bomber missions against Japan from Yunnan, are cited frequently, including in dinner toasts to visiting scholars.
Yunnan University has a significant program in cultural economics, and as my hosts I thank them for the invitation and for their extreme hospitality.
Yunnan is arguably the nicest province in China to visit, and one of the best trips in the world right now. The quality of infrastructure and accommodations is good, but exoticism and surprise remain high, the perfect combination. Go before it’s too late.
Infrastructure words of wisdom
The chief problem with our airports is not (pace Larry Summers) that they’re not as sleek and modern as the vast white elephants you’ll find in East Asia. Rather, it is that they are congested, and the reason they are congested is that the federal government doesn’t provide for market-rate pricing for take-off and landing slots. This straightforward reform would greatly increase the productivity, not to mention the pleasantness, of our aviation system. Yet it doesn’t involve spending billions of dollars and cutting ribbons, so politicians are by and large not interested.
That is from Reihan Salam.
Friday assorted links
1. European identity and redistributive preferences.
2. More from Uwe Reinhardt on Korean drama and Kimchi (pdf).
3. Markets (hierarchies) in everything, IBM style.
4. Ian Bremmer on the Iran deal. And Jeffrey Lewis.
5. China’s municipal debt problems (NB: boring link, pdf too). And what is wrong with Chinese gdp and inflation measures?, by Christopher Balding, plus David Keohane on same here. And more Keohane here, an overview, skip this stuff at your peril it is the most important economics in the world right now. All are excellent pieces.
6. Stereotyping diners — “Southern dad is always a winner.”
Open borders for a year?
There is debate over Open Borders vs. more restrictive immigration, but how about some combination of the two options? Please note, I am not advocating this, I just would like to see the discussion become a little broader and also less emotional.
What about open borders for a solid year, followed by a more restrictive immigration policy? This would encourage the arrival of those migrants who were decisive and could get their act together quickly. Of course you can think of many variants on this idea.
I started thinking along these lines in response to the well-known claims that Puerto Rican immigrants under-perform in terms of income because they can so easily go back and forth. So the goal with this proposal is to select for those people who are relatively sure they wish to come and stay.
Another variant therefore would have an exit fee for those migrants who sought to leave and return to their home countries. Imagine a bond posting, with the bond forfeited if the immigrant does not stay say five years.
What about open borders for a month? A week? Who would show up if they had only twenty-four hours to slip in?
The culture that is Singapore
The Commuter Graciousness Index, now in its third year, found that graciousness levels rose to 61.3 per cent in 2014, up from 42 per cent the year before. In 2012, the index stood at 38.6 per cent.
The index measures the perceived change in behaviour of commuters on public transport, and looks at three core behaviours: queuing up and giving way to fellow commuters, giving up seats to those who need them more, and moving in to allow more passengers to boardthe bus and train.
…In 2014, the LTA launched five cartoon mascots to promote more gracious behaviour among commuters: Stand-up Stacey, Give-Way Glenda, Move-in Martin, Bag-Down Benny and Hush-Hush Hannah.
They will continue to front the graciousness campaign, the LTA said, with a new three-dimensional look.
The full story is here, via Andrew Jackson.
Is the Great Reset coming first to immigrants?
Casey Warman and Christopher Worswick have a new and interesting NBER paper on Canadian immigrants. Apparently even the better-educated ones are not reaping real gains from (supposedly) skill-enhancing technical change:
The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a rising return to non-routine cognitive skills and a greater wage return to university education. Controlling for education, we find a pronounced cross-arrival cohort decline in earnings that coincided with cross-cohort declines in cognitive occupational task requirements and cross-cohort increases in manual occupational task requirements. The immigrant earnings outcomes had only a small effect on overall Canadian earnings inequality.
Immigrants of course are rarely labor market insiders, so, when structural change is occurring, they step into the new world of labor markets before the natives do. You will find non-gated versions of the paper here.
Thursday assorted links
James Buchanan as Intellectual Entrepreneur
James Buchanan was a fountainhead of ideas, as his twenty volume collected works demonstrate. But there is another side to Buchanan’s contributions that is less apparent. Buchanan was more than a scholar, more than an idea man. He was also an intellectual entrepreneur who led a worldwide movement. We like to believe that good ideas defeat bad ideas, that the cream rises to the top, that truth wins out in the end, but as John Stuart Mill (1859) stated, “Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error.” Indeed, error may attract more zealots, since error can bend itself to flatter, and the truth does not bend.
Buchanan understood right from the beginning that for good ideas to win requires a movement, and a movement is not built on ideas alone, but also on students, on conferences, on outreach, on media, and on money.
That is the opening to a I talk I gave at the 2013 memorial, “James M. Buchanan: A Celebration of Achievement,” just now published.
Esperanto fans
Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed.
And Baha’i’s not the only smaller religion that’s embraced Esperanto as a liturgical language. In Brazil, which has one of the world’s largest populations of Esperantists, the language is intimately associated with the séance-centric Spiritist movement, and many followers of the neo-Shinto Japanese religion Oomoto have studied some Esperanto.
Mao Zedong liked Esperanto too. The Communist Party of China has published an Esperanto magazine, El Popola Ĉinio, since 1950, and state radio stations still regularly broadcast in the language.
And perhaps most famously, George Soros grew up speaking Esperanto, though his public involvement with the language hasn’t gone beyond getting his father’s Esperanto memoirs translated into English.
That is from a new Sam Dean article on the on-line revival in Esperanto, via Ted Gioia.
When will Sana’a run out of water?
Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, may run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017 as available groundwater is unable to keep pace with the needs of a fast-growing population, experts warn.
Per capita water consumption is right now about two hundred cubic meters per year, compared to a scarcity threshold of 1700 cubic meters per year.
The cost of water has tripled in the last year, and the population of the city is expected to double within the next ten years.
There has been talk of moving the capital, as well as desalinating seawater on the coast and pumping it 2,000 metres uphill to Sanaa. But there are no concrete plans.
It may be too late for the removal of various water subsidies to make a difference, even assuming that were to happen. In the meantime, there have been few positive developments and of course the war is a huge negative.
It would be tragic, and in modern times unprecedented, if and when a major city simply runs out of water, and that could happen in about two years’ time. Here is further coverage.
Markets in everything sandcastle butlers those new service sector jobs
Building the biggest and the best sandcastles is an absolute must for children on beaches.
Now a travel company is stepping in to secure the all-important bragging rights for them – by launching the world’s first sandcastle butler service.
From Disney castles to favourite TV characters, the talented concierge staff will be on hand to transform a simple mound of sand into anything guests’ imaginations can conjure up.
Oliver’s Travels, a family villa specialist, is introducing the VIP service at selected destinations in Europe.
When guests book the service they will first get a sandcastle brainstorming session with the butlers in order to create an elaborate sand design.
New interview with Ben Goldacre
Here is one good bit of many:
I have a deep-rooted prejudice which is that if people can talk fluently in everyday language about their job, it strongly suggests that they have fully incorporated their work into their character. They feel it in their belly. There are people with whom you talk about technical stuff and it almost feels like they can only talk about it in a very formal way with their best work face on – as if the information they are talking about has not penetrated within. Twitter cuts through that and is a way of finding people who are insightful and passionate about what they do, like junior doctors one year out of medical school who take you aback when you realise they know more than people whose job it is to know about a particular field, such as 15 year-old Rhys Morgan. He has Crohn’s disease and went onto Crohn’s disease discussion forums and discussed evidence, whilst noting down people making false claims about evidence for proprietary treatments. He ended up giving better critical appraisal of the evidence that was presented than plenty of medical students. This was all simply because he read How to Read a Paper by Trish Greenhalgh and some of my writings, so he has learnt about how critical appraisal works and what trials look like along with the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of evidence. Thanks to Twitter, I have been able to read about people like Rhys in action and to see ideas and principles really come alive and be discussed and for that, it is wonderful.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Stephen Williamson on Canadian fiscal consolidation.
2. David Warsh on Friedman and Samuelson.
3. Solar geo-engineering. And EITC is better than you think.
4. Retirement actually seems to make people happier.
5. One Arlington high school class has 117 valedictorians.
6. John Cochrane responds on interest rates. Here Noah summarizes his view of the debate.
What good is training in moral philosophy?
Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman have an interesting paper (pdf, pubished Cognition version here) which raises that question rather directly:
We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.
I wonder to what extent economists do better at treating sunk costs as sunk? The pointer is from Michelle Dawson.
By the way, ethicists are not more ethical. Just in case you were wondering. Are economists more economical?