Results for “from the comments” 1938 found
Academic Freedom
Earlier Tyler posted the story of Daniel Sumner, the agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis who has been accused of “treason” for analyzing US cotton subsidies for Brazil in a WTO case. One of the most troubling aspects of the case is that instead of backing him to the hilt, Sumner’s dean bowed to King Cotton and questioned his judgment.
Michael Ward a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Arlington (and a regular MR reader, I might add) has authored a Petition in Support of Academic Freedom stating in part:
To the extent that it is within their expertise and terms of employment:
1. It is appropriate for scholars to engage in public policy debates regardless of the comments’ effects on US producers or consumers.
2. It is appropriate for scholars to consult with interested parties in policy-making or judicial matters even when the adversary is the US government or US interests.
You can express your support here.
Buying Collaboration II
On Monday, I described a controversial auction by William Tozier of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The highest bidder would win the chance to collaborate and write an academic article with him.
A number of readers sent interesting comments. Some, like Davis King, pointed out that collaboration for pay already exists and is quite common in some fields like computer science. He also pointed out a lot of de facto collaboration for pay, such as when undergraduates pay tuition and get the opportunity to co-author papers with professors.
Two readers noted that at least one scientist, Miriam Rothschild – a noted bug scientist, was independently wealthy and funded a long string of collaborations in fields that weren’t receiving much attention. The resulting work is well accepted in biology and her self-funding didn’t seem to raise suspicions about her work.
One reader noted that pay for collaboration might be hard to distinguish from research assistance. This is a good point, but I think there is a simple response – research assistants merely carry out the instructions of the researchers while paid collaborators are compensated for original, creative work.
Mr. Tozier himself wrote to me and told me about his current project, an online forum that would facilitate collaboration among non-academic researchers. I think the future probably holds a continuum of possibilities – universities will probably sponsor only “altruistic” research while scientists outside the academy will probably work together in more varied contexts.
Question about blogging software
Does anyone know of blogging software that allows blog posts and blog comments to be rated with the comments rising to the top the higher they are rated? I am thinking of something much like Amazon’s book pages where readers can rate both the books and the comments. The software would have to be flexible. Alternatively, can anyone out there write or modify existing software to perform these sorts of tasks? Email me with leads. Thanks!
Map the Power Elite
They Rule is a very cool website that uses flash player as a front-end to a database on corporate boards. Find out who is on the board of any of the largest publicly held corporations, choose two firms and find the connections between their boards (ala six degrees of separation), map the power-elites. The map below (click to expand) gives an idea of what the site is all about.
The author, Josh On, is an odd-mix of old-style lefty and cutting edge technologist. When he’s not putting together websites like this what does he do?
Twice a week I stand outside on a street corner and try to engage strangers in conversations about politics. This would be much harder without a copy of Socialist Worker in my hand.
Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.
Future Imperfect
Economist David D. Friedman has posted a draft of his manuscript, Future Imperfect, and he welcomes your comments.
This book is about technological change, its consequences and how to deal with them.
. . .
Much of the book grew out of a seminar I teach at the law school of Santa Clara University. Each Thursday we discuss a technology that I am willing to argue, at least for a week, will revolutionize the world. On Sunday students email me legal issues that revolution will raise, to be put on the class web page for other students to read. Tuesday we discuss the issues and how to deal with them. Next Thursday a new technology and a new revolution. Nanotech has just turned the world into gray goo; it must be March.
Since the book was conceived in a law school, many of my examples deal with the problem of adapting legal institutions to new technology. But that is accident, not essence. The technologies that require changes in our legal rules will affect not only law but marriage, parenting, political institutions, businesses, life, death and much else.
Microsoft: damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t
Lynne Kiesling, Brad Delong, Steven Bainbridge, Arnold Kling, Alex, and others recently had an interesting discussion about Microsoft and bundling. (Lynne links to the main posts, but see also the comments and trackbacks.)
Here’s an amusing and possibly instructive footnote to that discussion. According to the Los Angeles Times, “. . . Microsoft is coming under fire for what it isn’t bundling.“
As Windows users are being plagued by computer viruses, spam, buggy software and Web pop-up ads, some are questioning why the Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth has failed to integrate security and repair features that would make computers less prone to problems.
. . .
But bundling security features directly into Windows isn’t so simple, Microsoft supporters say.
The company, after all, has been punished by regulators in the U.S. and Europe for leveraging Windows to take over lucrative new markets, including Web browsers and software for playing audio and video files. Presumably, a move to add security software would face the same kind of regulatory scrutiny.
Personally, I don’t think antitrust action is the primary reason why Windows lacks security features. I think the primary reason is that Microsoft was surprised by the extent of the problem, similar to how it was surprised in the mid 90s by how rapidly and deeply the Internet caught on.
But it sure would be hard to prove that.
Econ Journal Watch
The inaugural issue of Econ Journal Watch has just been published (I am an advisor and have a paper in the first issue). EJW publishes comments on articles appearing in economics journals. Other journals also publish comments but they are rare and generally restricted to pointing out logical or mathematical flaws in a chain of deductions. EJW, in contrast, seeks to take on the unrealistic assumptions, omission of relevant facts, and phony claims of relevance that pervade many economics articles.
EJW also has a number of recurring features such as “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion?.” Papers in this section test Truman’s quip about needing a one-handed economist. In the first issue, Rick Geddes looks at the postal monopoly and Mark Thornton at drug prohibition. When attention is focused on those economists who have actually studied the issue and reached a policy conclusion both authors find a surprising consensus in favor of reform.
Lots of other interesting material. I’ve put this one in our permanent list of resources (left hand side bar).
Twenty questions
Co-blogger Alex Tabarrok is interviewed by Will Baude of Crescat Sententia. Read Alex on why he blogs, the Alien and Sedition Acts, his 7-point plan for financial security, why we do not have comments, and many other interesting matters.
Markets in everything, the ongoing saga
St. Francis Episcopal Church in Stamford, Conn., in a bid to fill empty pews, has introduced a monthly Sunday service for pet owners who wish to take their dogs and cats (and presumably birds, ferrets, and boa constrictors) to the altar to receive the host or a special benediction. Other houses of worship around the country, the paper noted, are also offering everything from pet-friendly services and prayers for the animals to pet funerals and “bark mitzvahs.”
Here is Kasha’s Bark Mitzvah. By the way, “All of Beth Shir Shalom’s Bark Mitzvahs are held in the parking lot, to avoid any “accidents” in the sanctuary.”
Here is a photo of the Episcopal version of a pet-friendly service (no fear of accidents, apparently; see also the attached comments, such as “It looks like that black dog in the picture has some sort of mind control over that old lady. It gives me the creeps.”). Here is the full story, add your own commentary, you don’t want to hear “My Take” on this one.
Sugar protection
Lynne Kiesling says it all, with some side comments on outsourcing.
How to stay together
What best predicts whether a marriage will last?
The crucial predictors, say the researchers, are the presence of facial expressions that accompany emotions such as contempt. Gottman says that just watching a couple and looking for this expression, described as a sideways pull of a corner of the mouth accompanied by rolling eyes, is enough to make a good guess about a couple’s suitability. “This is our best predictor,” he says. “Contempt is the sulphuric acid of love.”
We are told that the entire model has a 94 percent success rate in predicting divorce.
Here is some positive advice for Valentine’s Day:
Gottman may also have stumbled across the secret of a lasting relationship – simply ignore the nasty comments from your partner. He says that courting couples tend to ignore negative statements and pay more attention to positive remarks. Once married, this trend often reverses, although couples that remain together into their sixties retain this outlook.
How about gay couples?
…gay and lesbian couples, as well as heterosexual couples that do not marry, hold on to the positive value of courtship better than straight partners who get hitched, he says.
For more information, read The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models. Are they joking with that title?
Libertarians for tax increases?
We now have two parties in Congress, the tax and spenders and the no-tax and spenders. What’s a libertarian to do? Julian Sanchez, associate editor of Reason, reminds us that,
A tax cut financed by deficits is ultimately no more responsible than a spending program financed the same way.
What about the starve the beast argument? Well, the beast isn’t starving. Furthermore, as Sanchez writes,
The logic behind this “starve leviathan” theory is not totally mad, though it bears a creepy resemblance to the Marxist revolutionary slogan that things “have to get worse before they get better.”… And just as plausible as the “starve leviathan” hypothesis is the theory that combining spending growth with tax cuts hides the true cost of burgeoning programs, creating a political culture in which there’s no will to restrain appropriations.
Like Sanchez, I today would take a deal combining tax increases with serious cuts in entitlement spending.
Addendum: Alan Greenspan agrees. See Brad DeLong’s comments.
The cost of new drugs
In 2003, Joseph DiMasi, Ronald Hansen, and Henry Grabowski published an important paper in the highly-regarded Journal of Health Economics that estimated that the average cost of developing a new drug was around $805 million dollars. Hal Pawluk at Blog Critics repeats some nonsense from Public Citizen to claim that high research costs for pharmaceuticals are a myth and that this paper in particular is part of a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies to raise prices. Frankly, the comments of the critics are laughable but not everyone sees the joke so I will explain.
Here is the number one criticism, the “major flaw,” in the DiMasi et al. study according to the critics.
1. The $802 million included $400 million that had nothing to do with bringing drugs to market. It was an estimate of how much the drug companies could have made by investing in some other way. This is an imaginary number that the drug companies do not pay.
(See also, Public Citizen who say these are “theoretical costs that drug companies don’t actually incur.”)
Firms spend on R&D from the day the development process begins up until the day the drug is approved for marketing which may be a decade or more later. But a dollar spent early in the process could have been earning interest in the bank for years before marketing approval is achieved. Recognizing this, DiMasi et al. calculate the cost of the drug as if all the money had been spent on the day the drug was approved.
Is this unreasonable? Well, suppose you lend me $5000 – how much would you want back in a year, in 2 years, in 10 years? The longer the loan period the more you would expect back when the loan came due, right? This is exactly the same calculation performed by DiMasi et al.
I challenge anyone who thinks this is imaginary money to lend me $5000. I guarantee to repay them the same return as they recognize as legitimate for the pharmaceutical companies.
New sports and technology blog
Nick Schulz, of TechCentralStation.com fame, has started a new blog on sports and technology, part of the Corante.com group. At the blog you can read Nick on the true meaning of sports, whether better equipment improves your golf game, how to solve the steroids problem, and why sports fans seem to enjoy a lack of competitive balance. John-Charles Bradbury addresses this same topic as well. From Nick’s own TCS, read this account of how NFL Films has driven the popularity of football in America. Here is a related story about how to better measure value in football, using a Bill James-like approach.
My own major sports interest, the NBA, has just started its own blog, though this consists largely of celebrity comments, presumably ghostwritten for the most part. Try also this sports and law blog. Did you know that relocating the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn might push at least 800 people out of their homes and require eminent domain?
By the way, Nick says the smart money is on the Panthers for today’s game.
The benefits of outsourcing
Virginia Postrel has been blogging up a storm on outsourcing, click here for a sterling post. In addition Her latest NYT column offers an excellent historical tale of outsourcing:
In the late 1980’s, Asian manufacturers began turning out basic memory chips, undercutting American chip makers’ prices and inciting a fierce policy debate. Many industry leaders argued that the United States would lose its technological edge unless the government intervened to protect chip makers.
In a famous 1988 Harvard Business Review article, Charles Ferguson, then a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development at M.I.T., summed up the conventional wisdom: “Most experts believe that without deep changes in both industry behavior and government policy, U.S. microelectronics will be reduced to permanent, decisive inferiority within 10 years.”
He denounced the “fragmented, chronically entrepreneurial industry” of Silicon Valley, which was losing market share to government-aided Asian businesses. “Only economists moved by the invisible hand,” he wrote, “have failed to apprehend the problem.”
Those optimistic economists were right. The dire predictions were wrong. American semiconductor makers shifted to higher-value microprocessors. Computer companies bought commodity memory chips and other components, from keyboards to disk drives, abroad. Businesses and consumers enjoyed cheaper and cheaper prices.
Far from an economic disaster, the result was a productivity boom. As global manufacturing helped to reduce the price of information technology sharply, all sorts of businesses, from banks to retailers, found new, more productive ways to use the technology.
“Globalized production and international trade made I.T. hardware some 10 to 30 percent less expensive than it otherwise would have been,” Dr. Mann estimates in an institute policy brief. (Her paper, “Globalization of I.T. Services and White-Collar Jobs: The Next Wave of Productivity Growth,” can be downloaded at iie.com.)
As a result, she estimates, gross domestic product grew about 0.3 percentage point a year faster than it would have otherwise, adding up to $230 billion over the seven years from 1995 to 2002. “That’s real money,” she said in an interview.
By building the components for new integrated software systems inexpensively, offshore programmers could make information technology affordable to business sectors that haven’t yet joined the productivity boom: small and medium-size businesses, health care and construction.
I link to Doug Irwin’s excellent outsourcing piece at The Volokh Conspiracy. Daniel Drezner covers the debate in his usual quality fashion. Arnold Kling offers good comments as well. Here’s hoping that this swell of intellectual support for free trade continues. Here is a more ambivalent Glenn Reynolds.