Ross Douthat asks

by  Tyler Cowen in

If a newly re-elected Democratic president can’t muster the political will and capital required to do something as straightforward and relatively popular as raising taxes on the tiny fraction Americans making over $250,000 when those same taxes are scheduled to go up already, then how can Democrats ever expect to push taxes upward to levels that would make our existing public programs sustainable for the long run?

Here is more.

The Ricardo effect in Europe (Germany fact of the day)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Six percent of the value of all mowers sold in Germany are now robotic, and the country’s automatic mower market is growing in “double digits,” according to research company GfK Retail and Technology GmbH…

The market for hands-free mowers, which expanded by more than 30 percent last year, offers a rare bright spot in Europe’s consumer climate. The European market may grow as much as 20 percent annually over the next five years, Olsson said. Most of the customers are in Sweden, Germany, France and Switzerland — countries that have so far proven resilient to the debt crisis.

Demand for the garden robots has “exploded the last couple of years,” said Mats Gustafsson, owner of Moheda Jarnhandels AB, a hardware store in the southern Swedish town of Moheda. Gustafsson said he’s sold almost 60 robomowers this year, compared with fewer than 10 five years ago.

They cost about 1,700 euros, with falling prices, and they work like this:

The mowers use sensor technology to stay within a defined area of the yard, and are typically able to avoid obstacles such as trees and lawn furniture. Some of the mowers, including those made by Husqvarna, move around in random patterns, while others such as Bosch machines follow distinct lines.

For obvious reasons, this technology is less widespread in the United States.  By the way, for those of you who doubt whether machinery can exert a negative effect on wages, it is still worth reading David Ricardo’s chapter “On Machinery.”

The article is here, and hat tip goes to the excellent Daniel Lippman.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Instead of long beards and robes, they wear track suits and T-shirts. Their tablets are electronic, not hewn of stone, and they hold smartphones, not staffs. They may not look the part, but this ragtag group of Israelis is training to become the next generation of prophets.

For just 200 shekels, about $53, and in only 40 short classes, the Cain and Abel School for Prophets says it will certify anyone as a modern-day Jewish soothsayer.

The school, which launched classes this month, has baffled critics, many of whom have dismissed it as a blasphemy or a fraud.

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Asher Meir.  By the way, I found this to be an especially odd and ineffective response:

“There is no way to teach prophecy,” said Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish thought at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “It’s like opening a school for becoming Einstein or Mozart.”

I wonder what Bryan Caplan will think of this line:

Hapartzy can’t guarantee his course will give his students a direct line to God. But, he says, the syllabus provides the essential tools to bring out the prophet in anyone.

Here is another oddly incorrect statement:

 Roie Greenvald, a 27-year-old tennis instructor attending the classes, also showed some skepticism. While he expressed interest in the spiritual development the course offers, one crucial detail stands in the way of his religious elevation.

“I’m not going to become a prophet,” he said. “I don’t think it pays very well.”

The school takes on all comers and it is run by a Russian immigrant and software engineer.

Stories to watch for in 2013

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a list from The Guardian.  Here is an FT list.  My list looks more like this:

1. Economic turnarounds in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and possibly Pakistan and Myanmar.

2. Pressures for secession in Catalonia, and a potential crisis of the Spanish state.

3. East Asian belligerence, with more hawkish leaders in the three major countries.

4. There is actually a non-trivial chance we totally blow it on the debt ceiling.

5. The continuing rise of machine intelligence and the general recognition of such as the next major technological breakthrough.

6. Significant positive reforms in Mexico on education, foreign investment, and other matters too.

7. Political collapse in South Africa.

8. Continuation of America’s “Medicaid Wars,” over state-level coverage, combined with the actual implementation of much more of ACA.  Continuing attempts in Rwanda, Mexico, and China to significantly extend health care coverage to much poorer populations.

9. The return of dysfunctional Italian politics, combined with the arrival of recession in most of the eurozone economies, including France and Germany.

10. The ongoing barbarization of North Africa, including Mali, Syria, and possibly Egypt.  And whether any of these trends will spread to the Gulf states.

11. Whether China manages a speedy recovery and turnaround.

12. Watching India try to overcome its power supply problems, its educational bottlenecks, and its low agricultural productivity.

13. Seeing whether Ghana makes it to “middle income” status and how well broader parts of Africa move beyond resource-based growth.

14. Whether U.S. and also European political institutions can handle the intensely distributional nature of current fiscal questions.

Those are some of the main stories I will have my eye on, but of course I expect to be surprised.  I suppose Israel and Iran should be on that list somehow, North Korea too, but I don’t find that thinking and reading about it yields much in the way of return, compared to a simple “wait and see.”

Addendum: Here is Matt’s list.

Restrictions on high skill immigration to Britain

by  Alex Tabarrok in

From The Independent:

Russian-born physicist Professor Sir Andre Geim said new restrictions on non-European Union immigrants, including minimum salary requirements of at least £31,000 and tighter student visa rules, are blocking the brightest academics from working at British institutions. He told The Independent on Sunday that the restrictions would have prevented him and his team from identifying the revolutionary “super-material” graphene, which earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.

Sir Andre warned that future scientific breakthroughs at British institutions were at risk because of the tighter controls, introduced this year to bring down annual net migration from more than 200,000 to “tens of thousands”.

..Sir Andre, 54, first arrived in the UK in the early 1990s as a Russian citizen with a permit to work as a post-doctoral fellow at Nottingham University. His salary would have been around £27,000 in today’s money, meaning that he would have been barred from entry under the minimum salary requirement.

FYI, Geim is one of my favorite scientists of all time. He is the only individual to win both a Nobel prize, for graphene, and an Ig Nobel prize, for frog levitation. Awesome!

The Portuguese fiscal cliff [penhasco fiscal?]

by  Tyler Cowen

Lisbon plans to lift income tax revenue by more than 30 per cent[this coming year], raising the effective average rate by more than a third from 9.8 to 13.2 per cent. Anyone receiving more than the minimum wage of €485 a month, including pensioners, will also pay an extraordinary tax of 3.5 per cent on their income.

We’ll see how that goes, here is the rest of the FT story.  Here are some related earlier posts.

Profile of John Ioannidis

by  Tyler Cowen in

He is an important thinker and here is one part of the profile:

Ioannidis’s current work stems from his deep love of math and statistics. He was born in New York City to physician parents but raised in Athens, Greece, where he excelled at math from a young age. He attended the University of Athens Medical School, added a PhD in biopathology, and later trained at Harvard and Tufts and joined the National Institutes of Health, where he worked on pivotal HIV research. These days, although he often collaborates on the design of specific studies, what he mostly does is meta-research, or the study of studies. Using powerful number-crunching programs and constantly evolving algorithms, Ioannidis analyzes many trials, each with many patients. He’s working to see not so much whether one treatment works or does not work, or whether one association of a specific risk factor with one disease is true or false, but whether factors related to the research process—the number of patients tested, the criteria for including data, statistical errors in an analysis, even fraud or financial incentives—may have compromised the data and conclusions. He burst on the medical establishment radar in 2005 with a paper in PLoS Medicine asserting nothing less than: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

Here is Alex’s earlier post on him.  For the pointer I thank Mark D.

Pakistan update

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Militants kill 41 in the Peshawar region.

2. Adulterated cough syrup kills 33, the second such incident in recent times.

3. Pakistan lifts its YouTube ban, but for three minutes only.

Those are the headlines immediately visible today.

Less widely reported is that during 2012, the Pakistani stock index — namely the KSE-100 — is up 48% in local currency and 37% in U.S. dollars.