Results for “China” 2936 found
Assorted links
1. ECB document on virtual currency schemes (pdf).
2. Is this the most brilliant computer vs. computer chess game ever? It is so brilliant you might not even be thrilled by it. That’s your fault.
4. How dangerous is dental floss? Waxed or unwaxed? And, as Peter Thiel suggests, have we lost the ability to solve big problems?
5. Subramanian reviews Acemoglu and Robinson.
6. Is it my imagination, or is Mitt getting in a few Straussian pokes at Catholicism here? And Wonkblog does up a Romney tax calculator.
Price flexibility
If you think Chinatown normally has an unpleasant odor, imagine what it smells like 24 hours following no refrigeration. Street vendors were trying to unload perishables at bargain prices. I saw a fish weighing roughly 20 pounds and spanning 3 feet from head to tail go to a buyer for $1 dollar. $1 dollar!!!!!
Here is more, sad and tragic and informative throughout. Hat tip goes to David Wessel and @lisang.
Assorted links
1. Science is the key to growth.
2. Roberto Unger criticizes Keynesianism.
3. Are psychopaths physically attractive?
4. Are economists ignoring neuroeconomics?
5. How permanent is the rise in risk premia? And a combinatorial prediction market for the election and related matters.
6. Thwarted India and China markets in everything, Siri edition.
The Solow Model
The Solow Model is a workhorse model of economic growth. Many subsequent papers in growth theory and in business cycle theory build on this model. A model of growth helps us to structure our thinking. Why is it, for example, that China is growing faster than the United States despite having much poorer institutions such as the rule of law? Surprisingly, even a simple version of the Solow model offers some useful predictions and ways to interpret aspects of the the growth data. At MRUniversity this week we have four videos on the Solow model. These videos are a bit more technical than many of our previous videos and we think they will be useful in many other classes such as macroeconomics, especially if you are using a truly excellent textbook. The videos will also be useful for anyone who wants to read more of the literature on growth theory or the empirics of growth (such as can be found, for example, in Barro and Sala-i-Martin’s Economic Growth or David Weil’s textbook Economic Growth). Even if you don’t want to study the theory in more depth, we think these videos will be useful for understanding development and how economists use theory and data to understand the sources of growth (and its absence).
Questions that are rarely asked
Japan is about to replace China as America’s biggest creditor. Could you please offer us some meaningless bluster about “getting tough with Tokyo?”
Here is more from Counterparties.
The marketing of Mo Yan
What is it like to win an (approved) Nobel Prize in China?:
On Tuesday, Fan Hui, a local official, paid a visit to Mr Mo’s father to ask him to renovate the family home.
“Your son is no longer your son, and the house is no longer your house,” urged Mr Fan, according to the Beijing News, explaining that the author was now the pride of China. “It does not really matter if you agree or not,” he added.
Mr Fan has earmarked the family home as the main attraction of the “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone”, but also has plans to create a theme park based on Mr Mo’s 1987 work, Red Sorghum.
Unwanted and unprofitable, Sorghum is no longer planted in the area, but this not regarded as an obstacle…
“One visitor dug up a radish [from Mr Mo’s vegetable patch],” reported the Beijing News. “He slipped it into his coat and showed it to villagers afterwards, saying: ‘Mo’s radish! Mo’s radish!’ ”
“A visiting mother picked some yams and told her daughter: ‘I’ll boil them, so you can eat them and win the Nobel prize too!'” Mr Mo’s brother, Guan Moxin, was forced to intervene to stop the family’s corn harvest, which was left lying out in the sun to dry, being swept away by the village tidying committee.
Mr Mo himself has been non-commital amid the excitement. Asked by China Central Television whether he was happy, he responded: “I do not know”.
Asked by Xinhua, the state news agency, whether his win would ignite a passion for literature in China, he said: “I think it will last for a month at most, maybe less, then everything will return to normal”.
He said he planned to use his £750,000 of prize money to buy a “big house” in Beijing. But then he realised that property prices have soared so high he could only afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Here is more, interesting throughout, and here is a related story. Hat tip goes to Literary Saloon.
Subsidies for virtual water
From Robert Glennon:
In 2012, the drought-stricken Western United States will ship more than 50 billion gallons of water to China. This water will leave the country embedded in alfalfa–most of it grown in California–and is destined to feed Chinese cows. The strange situation illustrates what is wrong about how we think, or rather don’t think, about water policy in the U.S.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank the estimable Chug.
Surnames and the laws of social mobility
Here is some new work by Gregory Clark (pdf):
What is the true rate of social mobility? Modern one-generation studies suggest considerable regression to the mean for all measures of status – wealth, income, occupation and education across a variety of societies. The β that links status across generations is in the order of 0.2-0.5. In that case inherited surnames will quickly lose any information about social status. Using surnames this paper looks at social mobility rates across many generations in England 1086-2011, Sweden, 1700-2011, the USA 1650-2011, India, 1870-2011, Japan, 1870-2011, and China and Taiwan 1700-2011. The underlying β for long-run social mobility is around 0.75, and is remarkably similar across societies and epochs. This implies that compete regression to the mean for elites takes 15 or more generations.
Here is NPR coverage:
“If I just know that you share a rare surname with someone who was wealthy in 1800, I can predict now that you’re nine times more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge. You’re going to live two years longer than an average person in England. You’re going to have more wealth. You’re more likely to be a doctor. You’re more likely to be an attorney,” Clark says.
Dylan Matthews offers some charts. For the pointer I thank Fred Rossoff.
Mark Bittman on the food plan
He writes:
But there is no national food policy that says, for example, the United States will consume one billion pounds of almonds in the next year, so let’s grow 1.5 billion and there’s plenty for export. Let’s not plant 2.5 billion because that land could be used for tomatoes or something else. I mentioned it to my editor and we agreed that it sounds a bit Stalinist.
[Interviewer] Talk about politically toxic.
Right! But that aside, why would you not want to talk about what’s the best thing for the future of the United States? I would argue that the answer is not what amounts to an anarchic market of a million individuals deciding what they want to plant and then having this dogma that the market will decide. Growing a lot of almonds and exporting them to China is not the end of the world, but I do think that when you look at the Midwest, where the vast majority of land is used to raise corn or soybeans used for feeding industrially raised animals or producing corn syrup for junk food, really is. It is something that is not going to change until we say that land is too valuable to us to be used that way. We need more diverse and regional agriculture. What harm would there be in making a plan?
Mark Bittman has done some of the best writing about cooking which the human race has produced, ever, and he has done it repeatedly and on a large scale, toss in writing on food travel as well. This discussion is…less good than that.
The link is here, and I thank Daniel for the pointer.
The origins of kimchi in Korea
Many would be surprised to discover that this seemingly traditional food was in fact first developed in the late 19th century. Also, the most important ingredient of kimchi, red pepper, was first introduced to Korea in the early 17th century through either China or Japan. The import of cabbage in the late 19th century from China explains the rather late emergence of cabbage kimchi.
That is from Seoul: A Window into Korean Culture, a very good book by Choi Joon-sik.
An MR reader on Proposition 37 (GMO labeling)
He wrote to me:
There’s two things about the labeling debate that really bother me:
First, we have to concede that not everything can be labeled. If so, the burdens would almost instantly put huge swaths of businesses out of business. My dad, a dentist, does not have to label every instrument to describe where the metal came from, which machines made it, etc. So the question is: where do we draw the line on what should be labeled? My view is, if there is scientific evidence suggesting a plausible connection to harm, then requiring labeling makes sense. But the view of the food activists is that they should just know everything, regardless of evidence, irrespective of cost. So everyone should pay high costs because of their fears, which have no basis in evidence or fact.
On related matters, here is Mark Bittman on his ideal food labels, serving up a rather ambitious proposal.
On one specific point, he wants to levy a black mark against companies which treat their workers poorly. On the contrary, that is a sign the product likely comes from a poor country and probably you are doing the world more good in buying it and, in the longer run, bidding up wages and working conditions in that country. It helps other people more to buy from China than Portland, even though workers fare much better in the latter locale. This difference in perspective is a simple illustration of how “ideal” food labeling can rather rapidly go wrong, especially when it is tangled up with the desire to make expressive statements about what one wishes to affiliate with or not.
A further question: at which margin do consumers stop paying attention? When was the last time you read your new iTunes “I agree” contract before clicking? Attention is scarce, so we need to pick and choose priorities.
What about the cost of producing such complicated labels and the enforcement of their veracity? Food supply chains these days are often quite complicated. Do you need to monitor how the fish sauce or oyster sauce in your composite food product was produced? Bittman writes:
These are not simple calculations, but neither can one honestly say that they’re impossible to perform.
That is setting a rather low bar, and vaguely at that. Most bad economic policies would meet that standard. I would rephrase it: first figure out how many small and poor and foreign farmers this labeling proposal would put under — and then get back to us with a proposal.
Here is my earlier survey post on Bittman and evidence relating to GMOs. And here Jonathan Adler offers an excellent analysis, including freedom of speech issues.
Arvind Subramanian is pessimistic about Indian growth prospects
“The Indian state is increasingly unable to provide a range of basic services: health, education, physical security, rule of law, water and sanitation. The writ of the Indian state, for example, covers only about 80% of India, with the tribal belt essentially contested by Maoist insurgents. The private sector can substitute for some of these deficiencies but never completely. – In the long run, growth is determined by effective state capacity: that is India’s weakness compared with China.”
Here is more, in the form of a debate. Hat tip goes to Tom Murphy.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. What Emma Thompson likes to read.
2. is there a poet for romney?
3. The sad tale of infrastructure in Valencia.
4. Beijing’s dangerous game, and the economics behind the islands dispute.
5. Felix Salmon encounters Joseph Stiglitz and theology.
6. New Chronicle story of neuroeconomics, and there is no great stagnation.
The Great Rice Stagnation
…the rice yield per hectare in Japan, after climbing for more than a century, has not increased at all over the last 17 years. It is not that Japanese farmers do not want to continue raising their rice yields. They do. With a domestic support price far above the world market price, raising yields in Japan is highly profitable . The problem is that Japan’s farmers are already using all the technologies available to raise land productivity.
Like Japan, South Korea’s rice yield also has plateaued.
…Rice yields in Chin are now very close to those in Japan. Unless Chinese farmers can somehow surpass their Japanese counterparts, which seems unlikely, China’s rice yields appear about to plateau. If China hits the glass ceiling for its rice yields, then one third of the world’s rice would be produced in three countries (Japan, South Korea, and China) that can no longer raise land productivity or expand the area in rice.
That is from the new, excellent and to the point Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, by Lester R. Brown.