The culture that is Singapore

by  Tyler Cowen in

A Singapore property developer is targeting the super rich with parking problems by marketing luxury apartments that allow owners to keep their cars next to their living rooms, even if they are on the top floor of the 30-storey block.

The development, near the city-state’s main thoroughfare of Orchard Road, features what are described as “en suite sky garages” that automatically transport cars in a lift up to the desired level at the touch of a biometric pad in the basement entrance.

…Singapore, along with Hong Kong, is home to more Maseratis, Ferraris and Lamborghinis per capita than anywhere else in the world.

From the FT, by Jeremy Grant, here is more.

From the excellent Yichuan (Lulu) Wang

by  Tyler Cowen in

You all should be following him, or so it would seem to me.  Here are excerpts from his post What China Could Be Building:

The real risk is not that the housing won’t be used, but that the crash would have secondary effects. Local governments are dependent upon land sales for revenues, meaning a housing crash could have serious implications for government. In Guangdong province, some local governments are actually tearing down mountains to make new land in the ocean, all to sell the land. This, along with the recent reversal of capital flows and possible insolvency of private wealth management firms, represents a serious liquidity risk that can have disastrous consequences.

…So let’s answer Scott’s [Sumner] fundamental question:

So here’s my question for all of you China skeptics that insist they are building way too much housing, infrastructure, heavy industry, etc.  What precisely do you want them to build more of?  And what are the 100s of millions of Chinese living in tiny ramshackle homes to do?  Sit tight for a few more decades while resources pour into nice urban services for the pampered elite?I want them to start building leaf blowers, so we don’t have so many Chinese people in the low productivity position of sweeping streets. I want them to start building farm equipment, so we don’t have so many Chinese farmers tending the fields. I want them to build more laundry machines, to free the rural Chinese from scrubbing clothes on washboards. I want them to build electric stoves, so my Grandpa can put away the coal fired outside oven. I want them to build computers that can deliver cheaper education to the masses.

Instead of just focusing on “building,” I want them to invest in human capital, so productivity can be at a level that we don’t need “make work” jobs. I want them to build more schools and hire better teachers, so classes aren’t as large and you’re not damned if you can’t make it in a top elementary school. I want productivity to be high enough that high end stores don’t need more clerks than actual customers.

I want these things among many others that will only be more obvious in a freer market.

That Scott can get a haircut for $4 or an ice cream cone for 50 cents shows how low productivity and wages are in China. Yet they will not grow any faster with more housing or more state directed investments. Cheap subway rides are nice, but are they not just another sign that transportation infrastructure has been built too quickly? I’m not saying China is hitting a ceiling for growth, or that vast swaths of China are condemned to poverty. But what I am saying is that we need to worry about the systemic fragility that underpins the Chinese system, and be very, very concerned about the unknown magnitude of the downside risk.

His full blog is here, his short bio is here.

The path dependence of astronaut walks

by  Tyler Cowen in

…there was a fierce behind-the-scenes battle between them to be first to set foot on the Moon. Early plans were for Aldrin, as module pilot, to step out first, but one version reported by Smith has it that Armstrong, as mission commander, lobbied more vigorously than Aldrin, and Nasa backed him up because he would be ‘better equipped to handle the clamour when he got back’ and, more mundanely, because his seat in the lunar module was closer to the door. Aldrin paid Armstrong back by taking no photographs of him on the Moon: the only manually taken lunar image of the First Man on the Moon is in one of many pictures Armstrong snapped of Aldrin, showing himself reflected in the visor of Aldrin’s spacesuit.

That is from this excellent Steve Shapin article, hat tip goes to @MauraCunningham.  I liked this part:

…they were on the same basic pay rates as other US military officers: most were captains, making about $17,000 a year. (On their missions to the Moon, they were entitled only to the standard $8 per diem for being away from base, with deductions for ‘accommodation’ provided in the spaceship.)

Astronaut self-insurance durable goods monopoly problem

by  Tyler Cowen in

During the 60s and 70s it would appear that private life insurance was not available to astronauts.  Autograph Magazine has a good post about how astronauts of the time used their own autographs as a form of life insurance for their families.

The Twelve

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Neil Armstrong, first moon walker, died yesterday.

In total, there have been twelve. Armstrong who was first, Peter Conrad who was 3rd, Alan Shepard who was 5th and James Irwin who was 8th, are gone, leaving just eight. Just eight of 7 billion. Alan Shepard was the oldest, he was born in 1923, the others were all born in the 1930s at a time when Orville Wright still lived. The youngest, Charles Duke, will be 77 this year.

Could we soon have an age where all the moon walkers are gone? Will children then wonder whether it happened at all?

From Neil Armstrong

by  Tyler Cowen in

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

And this:

I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work.

And finally:

I was elated, ecstatic and extremely surprised that we were successful.

There are more Armstrong quotations here.

The new Thomas Nagel book

by  Tyler Cowen in

The title is *Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False*.  Here is a brief summary of his “teleological” argument.  My bottom lines on it:

1. He is good on attacking the hidden hypocrisies of many reductionists, secularists, and those who wish to have it both ways on religious modes of thinking.

2. He fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly.  Bryan Caplan should beware.

3. The most typical sentence I found in the book was: “We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that is neither theistic nor reductionist.”

4. He doesn’t take seriously enough the view: “The Nagel theory of mind is simply wrong.”

5. People will dismiss his arguments to remain in their comfort zone, while temporarily forgetting he is smarter than they are and furthermore that many of their views do not make sense or cohere internally.

6. It is ultimately a book about how Christian many of us still are, and how closely the egocentric illusion is connected to a broadly religious worldview.  I don’t think he would see it that way.

For the pointer to the book — now out early on Kindle — I thank David Gordon.

Solve for the equilibrium

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the short video.  Here is text with photos and another video.  Five Ukrainian women, in an Ukrainian art museum.  They are sleeping, or rather pretending to sleep, dressed up as Sleeping Beauty.  Men come along and kiss them, on the lips, with each man allowed only one kiss.  They have all signed legally binding contracts.  If a woman responds to a kiss by opening her eyes and “waking,” she must marry the man.  The man must marry the woman.

Who will kiss?  When do eyes get opened?

The museum gives out free breath mints.

For the pointer I thank the excellent Daniel Lippman.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Via Chris F. Masse, robot stand-ins for professors.

2. Is the falling U.S. birth rate a temporary or permanent demographic shift?

3. Response to Orszag on competitive Medicare bidding.

4. Keeping Indian roots music alive.

5. The Chinese electricity numbers are scary.

6. “The fact that I don’t hear more people delivering the same clear message suggests to me that we don’t have enough objective observers.”  Link here, that is James Hamilton, “Federal Receipts and Expenditures.”

7. The past essays of the already-missed Arnold Kling.

Relative price effects

by  Tyler Cowen in

The worst drought in decades has destroyed more than half the U.S. corn crop, pushing prices to record levels and squeezing livestock owners as they struggle to feed their herds.

To cope, one Kentucky cattle farmer has turned to a child-tested way to fatten his 1,400 cows: candy.

“It’s so hard to make any money when corn is eight or nine dollars a bushel,” said Nick Smith, co-owner of United Livestock Commodities in Mayfield, Ky.

The chocolate and other sweet stuff was rejected by retailers. It makes up 5% to 8% of the cattle’s feed ration, Smith said. The rest includes roughage and distillers grain, an ethanol byproduct.

The candy’s high caloric content is fattening up the cows nicely, Smith said.

The full article is here.  For the pointer I thank Dave Bieler.