Marijuana sentences to ponder: new data from the Colorado experiment
“This study finds total marijuana demand to be much larger than previously estimated,” Colorado’s study concluded.
And this, which I think suggests the laws in other states are binding for many consumers:
Colorado concluded that visitors account for 44 percent of recreational marijuana retail sales in the Denver area. In the mountains and other vacation spots, visitors to Colorado account for 90 percent of recreational dispensary traffic.
And this, which sounds tautologous, but is not:
“Heavy users consume marijuana much more often, and more intensely, than other consumers,” the study concluded.
Overall heavy users seem to account for about seventy percent of total demand. Here is some detail:
Colorado’s market numbers bore out survey estimates that most marijuana is consumed by heavy daily users. For example, survey authors estimated that a third of all Colorado’s pot consumers use the drug less than once a month. But that group accounts for just 0.3 percent of the total market, analysts concluded.
The full story is here, the study itself is here. For the pointer I thank C., who I believe is not part of that seventy percent of market demand.
Sentences to ponder
Countless times, I have found that it is only during the physical exam that patients reveal what is truly on their mind. Whether it is the cough that they are reminded of now that I am listening to their lungs, or whether it is the domestic violence, the eating disorder or the genital symptoms that they feel comfortable revealing once we are in a more intimate setting — there is something about touch that changes the dynamic.
That is from Danielle Ofri’s interesting piece on the physical exam in medicine, via Jeffrey Flier.
Assorted links
2. The first robotic parking valet. And soccer robots.
3. Honest ontology, fantasy, and comedy. And here is Eric Kaplan’s forthcoming book Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation. He is connected to the show Big Bang Theory.
4. The Japanese television conspiracy (speculative). And in defense of replication.
What exactly is going wrong?
WHEN do individual pieces of data become a trend? In the past few days, we have seen a surprise 1.3% monthly slump in British factory output, a 1.8% decline in German industrial production, a 1.7% decline in France, and a 1.2% drop in Italy. No one can blame the weather for these numbers, as they did for first-quarter US GDP.
European stocks have been weaker, although a cumulative 2.6% drop is hardly a sign of panic.
That is from Buttonwood. The Espirito Santo debt problem in Portugal is probably not a major event in its own terms, but slotted into this overall picture it is worrying nonetheless. Is this what the end of QE looks like? Or is this turn in events caused by something else?
My re-read of *Harriet the Spy*, by Louise Fitzhugh (spoilers)
1. From 1964: “Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch is obnoxious. She dresses like a boy, throws temper tantrums, swears at her parents and thinks terribly unkind thoughts. She refuses to eat anything but tomato sandwiches for lunch. She even invents her own middle initial.”
2. She also keeps a notebook, spies on everyone, and writes down the truth about them. Her notebook is made public and she is disgraced, until making a comeback as the elected editor of the school newspaper (though see below). At the end she learns that some lying is necessary.
3. One message of this book is that writers, and journalists in particular, are neurotics. And liars. A more core message is that heroines are allowed to be nasty and tell the truth. Harriet throws a pencil in the face of Beth Ellen. Compare this with the goody two-shoes Nancy Drew.
3b. “Harriet…Are you still writing down mean things about people?” “No. I am writing my memoirs.” When I first read this book at age ten or so, I didn’t get the jokes. Note also the phallic wurst joke on p.105. Food/sex references run throughout, and there is a running contrast between Harriet’s duty to be an onion (hard, gets cut down the middle) with her desire to instead do nothing but munch on tomato sandwiches.
4. The opening of the book makes Harriet sound like an macroeconomist: “Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town. “See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can’t have too many or it gets too hard.””
5. Harriet the infovore announces her intention to know “everything in the world, everything, everything.”
6. On p.278 author Fitzhugh indicates to us that she is not herself telling us the entire truth about growing up. It is yet more brutal than this book is allowed to let on. After that page, everything which happens in the text is a lie, designed to make the casual reader feel better and to sell more copies. Harriet is not in fact voted editor of the school newspaper and not allowed to publish her critical rants to general acclaim with only a few retractions. This is a Straussian text and it makes fun of the reader’s willingness to believe in happy endings. The opening “make believe” scene mirrors these later deceptions.
7. This short essay compares Harriet to To Kill a Mockingbird. Other commentators stress that Louise Fitzhugh, the author, was a lesbian and perhaps Harriet is a budding lesbian too (she dresses like a boy and has a tomboyish haircut). I view Sport’s father, who is obsessed with getting a $$ advance for his book, as the stand-in character for Fitzhugh (start at p.260 and see also p.52 on the obsession with writing and money). Luxury is portrayed as corrupting and leading to indolence, so becoming a successful writer is a self-destructive process, noting that Fitzhugh herself stagnated after this hugely successful book.
8. In this book parents are typically indifferent, brutally indifferent I would say, toward their children.
9. In the movie version “…Harriet competes against Marion Hawthorne to see who has a better blog.”
10. This is a deep work, rich in jokes, and more than worthy of its iconic status. I am very glad to have reread it.
The decline of drudgery and the paradox of hard work
That is a new paper (pdf) by Brendan Epstein and Miles S. Kimball, the abstract is here:
We develop a theory that focuses on the general equilibrium and long-run macro-economic consequences of trends in job utility. Given secular increases in job utility, work hours per capita can remain approximately constant over time even if the income effect of higher wages on labor supply exceeds the substitution effect. In addition, secular improvements in job utility can be substantial relative to welfare gains from ordinary technological progress. These two implications are connected by an equation flowing from optimal hours choices: improvements in job utility that have a significant effect on labor supply tend to have large welfare effects.
I view this hypothesis as consistent with my view that we should be utility optimists but revenue pessimists. Here is a closely related paper I once wrote with Alex.
The pointer is from Claudia Sahm.
Visible Prices
(VP) is a digital humanities project, currently in development, for a collection of prices drawn from literary and historical sources in 18th and 19th century England. Users will be able to search for information relating to a specific good or service, or a specific amount of money. For example, a query for 3 shillings in 1789 reveals that in London, that amount would purchase a bushel of wheat, a quarto of translations from Diderot, or a day’s services of a crippled or deformed child as a companion to an adult beggar. My intent is for the database to make use of the influx of printed texts onto the web in facsimile format, in databases like Google Books, the Hathi Trust Digital Library, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the British Newspapers Collection, and the London Times Online Archive, to name only a few. Though entry privileges are currently restricted, the goal is to eventually make it possible for registered users to enter data in the process of individual research or classroom activities; and thus to make it possible for researchers specializing in other time periods and regions to extend the scope of the database.
The pointer is from Pam Regis.
Assorted links
1. Are people biased against black dogs?
2. Kickstarter in Everything (potato salad, average is over).
3. Jeff Koons employs 128 people.
5. Mining the streets of New York City. And peer review rings at the Journal of Vibration and Control.
6. Another 677 pp. from William Vollmann and can you guess the topic?
7. Is there a strategic trade policy justification for Ex-Im?
Arrived in my Twitter feed
Notice of:
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness
By Russ Roberts, now available for pre-order.
Some simple game-theoretic questions about Hamas rockets
Haaretz reports that some of the current rockets have a range of 150 km, which is longer than most of what has been fired in the past. So here is my question: when do those rockets become sufficiently powerful and numerous that they can close down Tel Aviv Airport, which is of course the main route in and out of Israel, especially for well-off people. If that can happen, is this not like a housing bubble game, where things can go very sour very quickly? And in the meantime, will the Israel government attempt “lower the mean, increase the variance” strategies, if only to forestall what is to them an obviously unacceptable outcome, namely that Hamas can could close Tel Aviv airport at will? Are we already at the point of seeing such mean-reducing strategies? If not, how much worse will things be when we get there?
The Gaza offensive
In March 1917, the EEF [Egyptian Expeditionary Force, from Great Britain] launched offensive operations in southern Palestine.
That is from the new and noteworthy book by Kristian Coates Unrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East. I wouldn’t say it is a fun book, but it is clear, well-written, and very good background reading on a number of today’s crises.
Those new service sector jobs: human props to sell real estate
The future is in marketing, right?:
When the Mueller family sits for dinner, the leftover broccoli and crepes are already wrapped in plastic, the kitchen is beyond spotless, and the rest of the home is so tucked-away tidy it looks like they just moved in. In a way, they have: Every inch of furnishing, every little trinket and votive candle, sits precisely as designers placed it five months ago. That would make them the most perfect suburban ideal, except for one catch: This isn’t actually their home. Bob and Dareda Mueller and their three grown sons are, instead, part of an “elite group” of middle-class nomads who have agreed to an outlandish deal. They can live cheaply in this for-sale luxury home if it looks as if they never lived here at all.
The home must remain meticulously cleaned and preserved: the temperature precisely pleasant, the mirrors crystalline clear. If a prospective buyer wants to see the home, they must quickly disappear. And when the home sells, they must be gone for good, off to the next perfect place.
That they do everything an owner would do — sleeping, making memories, learning the home’s quirks and secrets — imbues an otherwise-empty home with an unmistakable energy, say executives with Showhomes Tampa, the home-staging firm that moves them in. It also helps the homes sell faster, and for more money.
“They have to live a very different, very difficult life,” said Kim Magnuson, a sales director. Added franchise owner Linda Saavedra, “The home managers act like human props … and (with buyers) it’s like magic. It works phenomenally well.”
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Ted Frank. File under Markets in Everything.
Should LeBron James hurry up and decide?
Joshua Tucker says yes:
…if LeBron waits until every other play has signed, those players will all have made their decisions not thinking they have the maximum chance of winning a championship. Because they value both winning and making money, every one of those players will have signed for more money than they would have needed to sign had Lebron already signed with that team. LeBron, upon joining that team, will therefore be playing with players who were more expensive than they needed to be. This in turn means that whatever team he joins will either (a) have less money to sign LeBron or (b) have less money to sign other players besides LeBron and the free-agents they have already signed. Either way, LeBron gets less of what he wants (defined here as money + likelihood of winning) than if the other free agents had known he was going to be on that team before he signed.
Therefore the converse should also hold: by moving sooner, LeBron should be able to get more of what he wants. By virtue of being the single best free agent available, Lebron instantly adds more to a team’s chance of winning a championship than any other player, and therefore will drive down the cost of acquiring other players to complement him as he seeks out additional championships.
But I don’t think that is right. LeBron needed to find out if Wade and Bosh are willing to take significant pay cuts, to help Miami bring in better players. So far it seems he is learning the answer is “no.”
More formally, you can think of this as threshold and discontinuity issues kicking in. If LeBron signs quickly with Miami, and Wade and Bosh are selfish in pecuniary terms, Miami can’t do much of anything to become a decent contender. That is because the salary cap makes it very difficult to bring in other good players at reasonable cost (the “luxury tax”). No major free agents have stepped forward and shown their willingness to take a big pay cut to play with LeBron.
If that is indeed what has been learned, LeBron now can pit a few other teams against each other — Cleveland, the Lakers, maybe even Phoenix and Houston — and ask how big a financial commitment to winning they are able to make. (Miami of course can be kept in the mix.) It takes a while for those teams to signal their intentions, and that also requires waiting on LeBron’s part, if only to let the bids escalate. That is the way to extract greater sacrifices from other players and also from the owners, a factor which I don’t see Tucker putting at the center of his analysis.
Of course LeBron won’t wait very long. At some point each team has put its best plan on the table and then he will choose (for reasons similar to those outlined by Tucker), which is likely quite soon. Still, it is privately optimal for him to start that process with some waiting and with a minimum of non-committal rhetoric, which is indeed what we are observing.
There is something about bubbles we don’t understand
According to the Central Statistics Office, residential house prices in Dublin rose 22 per cent in the year to May. The last time Irish house prices were rising so fast was between 2002 and 2005, the years immediately before the crash. This is sparking talks of a new price bubble – mostly, so far, around the dinner table.
That doesn’t have to be a new bubble, and you will note that these prices remain well below their pre-crash peaks. Still, prices seem to be moving pretty fast in the market. It remains my view that some regions of the U.S. did not have a real estate bubble at all, and that for these regions it is the price bust which is the anomaly, not the initial run-up. It is an interesting question what percentage of the world that might hold for.
The FT story is here.
Assorted links
1. Claims about the brains of great traders. Not what I would have said.
2. Data on long-term trends, visually presented.
3. Can Google hackers put a restaurant out of business? And a simple critique of smart people (not really about Google, no slight intended).
4. Predictions for 2025, including flying cars. And the public choice angles on smart guns, by Joseph Nocera.
5. David Warsh with various speculations on various Nobel Prizes.
6. Ryan Avent: we still don’t know what is up with productivity.