Assorted links
What has San Diego contributed to American culture?
In honor of the AEA meetings I was going to do “My Favorite Things San Diego” but frankly I came up with what is more or less a total blank. Eddie Vedder? I like Tom Waits. Lots of athletes. What else?
San Diego, by population, is the eighth largest city in the United States. Yet it seems to have had hardly any cultural influence. What gives?
Movie, set in: Almost Famous, or perhaps A Day Without a Mexican.
End of story, unless you can tell me more. I’m sure to enjoy the weather, though I’ll look longingly at Tijuana just across the border.
Ice Cream Buybacks
NYTines: Mayor Blomberg announced today a new program to help reduce obesity and heart disease, ice cream buybacks. Any ice cream that citizens wish to turn in will be bought for up to $5 a pint. No questions asked. “Heart disease is the number one killer in the nation,” said Mayor Blomberg, “and we must do everything we can to get Ben and Jerry and these other killers off our streets.”
Critics argue that consumers are likely to reach into the back of their freezer to sell ice cream that is half-eaten, iced-over, and past its sell-by date, with little effect on heart disease. In previous buybacks, enterprising individuals have even bought cheap ice cream at Walmart and sold it back to the city at a profit. Economists have pointed out that local ice cream buybacks don’t make a lot of sense when ice cream remains widely available for sale. The National Academy of Sciences reported that the theory underling “buyback programs is badly flawed and the empirical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these programs.” Nevertheless, ice cream buybacks remain popular with voters.
More here, here and here on similar programs and here is my earlier op op-ed on a closely related topic.
Picture from Story Draw.
*The World Until Yesterday*
The author is Jared Diamond and the subtitle is What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies?
This is a difficult book to review. It is well written and intelligent, yet I struggle to find the novel propositions or the traction. Much of the book is description of the author’s earlier work in Papua New Guinea. These sections I enjoyed, though I did not find them revelatory or even mildly gripping. They also did not much incorporate more recent research on these communities. Other parts of the book repeat probably correct but tired points about privacy, obesity, the role of the elderly, and the like, comparing the modern world to earlier times. The discussions of the Pygmies — the hunter-gatherer community I know most about — seemed fine but not insightful. Beneath the surface is the question of how much different “hunter-gatherer” societies are alike or can be subject to generalization. Diamond never makes objectionable claims in this regard but ultimately the very premise of the book seems to require some objectionable claims, even if they are never put on paper.
If I had to place this book into the “good book” pile or “bad book” pile, I wouldn’t hesitate before putting it into the former. But I could not describe it as essential reading either. Perhaps I would have liked it more if I had expected less. In any case, I would have preferred a “more wrong” book that made me think more.
Here is a Chicago Tribune review of the book.
Kevin Kelly on why Robert Gordon is wrong
This is a very good piece. Here is the closing bit:
In his paper Robert Gordon talks about the huge value gained from “one-time” events, such as the one-time (first and last) move of a large proportion of women into the workforce. This new gain happens only once (assuming they remain). In this computer-internet economy we are experiencing a one-time gain from a huge one-time event. This is the first and only time a planet will get wired up into a global network. We are alive at this critical moment in history, and we are just at the beginning of the beginning of the many developments that will erupt because of this shift.
Cory Doctorow has interesting comments.
Ross Douthat asks
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)
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.
Assorted links
1. Wonkbook summary of the final deal. Notably, Rubio and Rand Paul — two guys who may want to run for President — voted against it.
2. Has immortality been achieved?
3. Horoscopes for bureaucrats (the culture that is India).
Markets in everything
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.
Assorted links
1. Time magazine/WEF interview with me.
2. Getting physicians to wash their hands.
3. The ongoing death of retail, still underway this Christmas season.
4. The next Cass Sunstein book: Simpler: The Future of Government.
5. In spite of the cold weather, New Year’s is the deadliest day for pedestrians.
*Conscious Capitalism*
The authors are John Mackey (the John Mackey) and Raj Sisodia and the subtitle is Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.
Of all the local businesses which I enjoy, the Vienna, VA Whole Foods is my clear favorite.
Stories to watch for in 2013
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
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?]
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.
