Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Intentionally flawed goods:

Artist Jeremy Hutchison commissioned a series of intentionally incorrect products from factories around the world.

“I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”

Hutchison received a comb without tines…

Medicare Cost Control?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Long-time readers will know that I am skeptical of the FDA. Let’s ignore that for the purpose of this post. Now consider the following two quotes.

The FDA recommended unanimously that Avastin no longer be used to treat breast cancer, saying that the risks of the drug far outweighed any benefits.

…”Even though we have anecdotal information, we don’t have evidence that it prolongs survival or improves quality of life,” said Natalie Compagni-Portis, a patient representative and voting member of the FDA panel. In a series of four questions, the six-member panel voted across the board that the clinical trials conducted by Genentech did not provide evidence that Avastin prolonged life for breast cancer patients, nor did it improve their quality of life. The panel also recommended that FDA commissioner Peggy Hamburg should not continue to allow the drug to be used for breast cancer patients.

A strong statement from the FDA. Now compare:

Medicare will continue to cover Avastin for breast cancer treatment even if U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Peggy Hamburg decides to withdraw Avastin for such use, according to Don McLeod, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

“The FDA decision, when it comes, does not affect CMS,” McLeod told Reuters.

How does this make sense? Does CMS have information that runs counter to the FDA’s information? If so, let’s hear it. Or is this just a turf war? What does this say about the prospects for cost control of Medicare?

A change in regime?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

Here is more.  The normal recovery pattern is more skewed toward capital than you might think, but this particular gradient is unprecedented as far as I know.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey.  A pleasurable read and full of information.  For me it was most useful as a foreign policy history of Turkey, more than a biography of Ataturk himself.  One implication is that Turkey won’t be making too many more concessions on the global stage, or for that matter with the Kurds.

2. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill.  This is insanely good, and I can’t believe I had never read it before.  It’s super short, but a thrilling reading experience at every word.  It’s in the “jaw hits floor” category.

3. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930.  The best history of electrical infrastructure which I have found.  It is very good on explaining the difficulties in organizing an entire economy around electricity and why it took so long.  It is also fascinating on why the English lagged behind the Germans and Americans in the transition to electricity, in large part because of local interest group politics.  It sheds light on the “mystery” of British decline.  A long, nerdy book, with unintelligible Cooper Union-like diagrams, I loved it.  It’s one of mankind’s most stirring stories.

4. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.  I didn’t enjoy this book, so I didn’t read much of it, but I thought it was splendid in conception.  It requires some working knowledge of British urban landscapes and I, for one, have never been to Sheffield.  It’s a smartly written conceptual survey of the empty buildings that have come to populate British cities and I am sorry that I wasn’t up to it.

Punk’d

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Excellent piece in the Village Voice (some ads nsfw) about the Ashton Kutcher-Demi Moore campaign on child prostitution:

“It’s between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today,” Ashton Kutcher told CNN‘s Piers Morgan on April 18. That, says Kutcher, is how many kids are lost to prostitution in America every single year.

…”Last month, the New York Times breathlessly confided, “An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year.”…

• USA Today: “Each year, 100,000 to 300,000 American kids, some as young as 12…”

• CNN: “There’s between 100,000 to 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States…”…

• C-SPAN: “Children in our country enslaved sexually…from 100,000 to 300,000…”

But a detailed review of police files across the nation tells another story.

Village Voice Media spent two months researching law enforcement data.

We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities during a 10-year period.

To the extent that underage prostitution exists, it primarily exists in those large cities.

Law enforcement records show that there were only 8,263 arrests across America for child prostitution during the most recent decade.

That’s 827 arrests per year.

The article has much more detail on how an already bogus figure of 100,000-300,000 children “at risk” of prostitution expanded and then went viral. 

Patents out of control

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Apple has been granted an incredibly broad patent giving them monopoly rights to gesture recognition on multitouch displays.

“It covers the basic user interface concept of moving touch-screen content with multitouch gestures–not just one particular way to programmatically recognize one particular gesture for this purpose, but any or all ways to do so,” Mueller said. “This patent describes the solution at such a high level that it effectively lays an exclusive claim to the problem itself, and any solutions to it.”

Patents are supposed to increase the progress of the useful arts. But does anyone really believe that gesture technology would have been left undeveloped without the prospects of a 20-year monopoly?

Papers about robot vacuum cleaner personalities

by  Tyler Cowen in

There are some, and they are important:

In this paper we report our study on the user experience of robot vacuum cleaner behavior. How do people want to experience this new type of cleaning appliance? Interviews were conducted to elicit a desired robot vacuum cleaner personality. With this knowledge in mind, behavior was designed for a future robot vacuum cleaner. A video prototype was used to evaluate how people experienced the behavior of this robot vacuum cleaner. The results indicate that people recognized the intended personality in the robot behavior. We recommend using a personality model as a tool for developing robot behavior.

A summary discussion is here, interesting throughout.  From this paper you can surmise a bit about the origins of religion, the seen and the unseen, and the demand for conspiracy theories, in addition to robot vacuum cleaners.

There is No Great Stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Greenhouses lined with genetically modified marijuana sit on a mountainside just an hour ride from Cali, Colombia, where farmers say the enhanced plants are more powerful and profitable.

One greenhouse owner said she can sell the modified marijuana for 100,000 pesos ($54) per kilo (2.2 pounds), which is nearly 10 times more than the price she can get for ordinary marijuana.

Here is more and for the pointer I thank MT.