Sentences to ponder
There’s a measles outbreak in Massachusetts, probably thanks to low vaccination rates.
It’s hard to believe, but we’re sliding backwards on two of the three public health achievements of the 20th century: vaccination, antibiotics, and clean water. Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, one that we’re partly inflicting on ourselves by rampant overuse. And now vaccine resistance is spreading among parents who want to free ride on the herd immunity of others. If these diseases were widespread, they’d be rushing to vaccinate their kids. But they can delay, or forgo the vaccines entirely, thanks to other parents who are willing to risk their kids in order to do the right thing. They’re already killing little babies who catch pertussis before they can be vaccinated, and now measles has killed six people in France just since the start of the year.
That is from Megan McArdle.
Am I in a Dutch novel?
Erik Voeten, who blogs at the excellent Monkey Cage, writes to me:
I recently read a novel by a well-known Dutch author (well-known in the Netherlands that is) called Arnon Grunberg. The novel is about a Dutchman who leaves his family and fiancee to teach economics at GMU. In the novel, one of the characters is a GMU professor called Elliot Hegel (no relative) who is “an economist with broad interests who also maintains a blog on which he writes about economics and culinary affairs. His hobby is Chinese food.”
Hegel is not a major character, perhaps his major act is to force the Dutch professor to eat pig ears, but I thought you would nonetheless be amused. The novel is called “Huid en haar.” I don’t think this one has been translated, although some of his earlier books were. Here is the NYT review of his debut novel: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/02/books/sex-drugs-and-slivovitz.html?src=pm
As long as we are on medieval topics…
Science magazine reports that Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, and his fellow seismologists have been charged with manslaughter after they allegedly didn’t alert the residents of L’Aquila in Central Italy before a quake hit that town and killed 308 residents.
This might seem insanely harsh. Seismologists do work hard at trying to discover when and where a quake might hit.
However, in this case, it seems that these seven, all of whom sit on Italy’s major risks committee, reportedly offered certain words of reassurance that caused some residents of L’Aquila not to abandon their homes, but to stay in an area that had previously experienced some smaller quakes.
Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella reportedly offered that the seven had held a televised press conference six days before the quake and offered “imprecise, incomplete, and contradictory information.”
Some might wonder whether this is what scientists regularly do, however certain their words might sometimes seem. However, Garagarella reportedly further accuses Franco Barberi, the vice chairman of the committee, of specifically stating that no quake was to be immediately expected in the area.
This reassurance, Gargarella reportedly claimed to Corriere Della Serra, “thwarted the activities designed to protect the public.”
Single serving levees, the modern medieval world
That is via Jason Kottke.
Assorted links
Katrina’s Silver Lining
Here is Amy Waldman writing in The Atlantic in 2007:
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance. That system had begun with great promise, in 1841, as one of the first in the Deep South. It had effectively ended, in 2005, in disaster—and not just the natural kind. Its defining characteristics were financial high jinks and low academic performance. On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth-graders had failed to demonstrate “basic” skills in English/Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below “basic” in math. The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city’s schools, was $450 million in debt. Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them.
…New Orleans, barely a presence in the charter-school movement before the storm, now had a higher proportion of charter schools than any other American city—and unlike most of the country’s 4,000 such schools, these had the backing of the establishment. Most radical of all, the neighborhood school had been banished—parents would have total freedom to choose which school their children would attend, no matter where they lived. Introducing school choice and weakening teachers’ unions had both long been goals of many educational reformers. Circumstance had made New Orleans the laboratory for these ideas. Ben Kleban, a charter-school proponent drawn to New Orleans by this flourishing, called it “the biggest experiment in a system of schools of choice we’ve ever seen.” Leslie Jacobs, a member of the state school board, called it “the most market-driven system in the United States.”
So what are the results? Here is an article from Tuesday’s Times-Picayune:
Standardized test scores improved for the fourth year in a row for students in the state’s Recovery School District, providing more evidence that the radical reforms undertaken after Hurricane Katrina are producing results.
New state data show results in the RSD, a state body that took over most city schools after the 2005 storm, progressed somewhat unevenly, but once again outpaced the rest of Louisiana.
Since 2007, the proportion of students in the district scoring “basic” — essentially at grade level — or better has now more than doubled from 23 percent to 48 percent, rising faster than any other district in the state.
Many problems remain, of course, and educational reform has a way of nearly always disappointing. I have not crunched the numbers or looked at controls but the gain is impressive and the growth in scores is higher in the RSD region compared to other Louisiana regions.
It’s amazing that getting rid of “neighborhood schools”, i.e. neighborhood monopolies, should be considered a radical reform but it is and I am pleased that the signs are positive.
Bonus Discovery: Treme explained, a guide to the series.
Profile of Tyler
Brendan Greeley of Bloomberg has an excellent profile of Tyler, both amusing and accurate. Here’s one bit:
When Tyler Cowen was 15, he became the New Jersey Open Chess Champion, at the time the youngest ever. At around the same age, he began reading seriously in the social sciences; he preferred philosophy. By 16 he had reached a chess rating of 2350, which today would put him close to the top 100 in the U.S. Shortly thereafter he gave up chess and philosophy for the same reason: little stability and poor benefits.
He’d been reading economics, though. He figured that economists were supposed to publish, and by age 19 he had placed two papers in respected journals. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, he published in the “Journal of Political Economy” and the “American Economic Review.”
“They were weird, strange pieces,” he says, “but still in good journals, top journals. That cemented my view that I could, you know, somehow fit in somewhere.” I ask him what he was like, what made him doubt he could fit in.
“I was like I am now.”
“You’ve always been like that?”
“Always. Age 3. Whatever.”
“What did you do at age 3?”
“Read a lot of books.”
Read the whole thing especially for more on the sociology of the economics profession.
Oh and here is an interesting development, the hot new restaurants are now tweeting about Tyler. Strange world.
Remembering the past
Kurt Schuler sends along this announcement from the AEA:
EconLit Now Starts with 1886. The AEA has added records to EconLit for journal articles from 1886-1968 that were previously in the Index of Economic Articles, Vols. 1-10. EconLit on library web sites now includes older articles from 146 journals, 95 of which are currently indexed. Many of these journals are available through libraries’ full text subscriptions and may be linked to/from EconLit.
Which searches are correlated with searching for “economics”?
I believe that kind of question is what Google Correlate helps you answer, here are the results. Are you surprised that “art history” comes in first? (Is economics not a science after all?) You can play other fun games with this new tool. Here is Justin Lahart on Google Correlate, which links the Fed to remedies for nausea.
Price discrimination
Johnson insisted the casinos have only themselves to blame for their losses, opening the door by offering him high-stakes gambling. They also agreed to discount 20 percent of his blackjack losses as an incentive to get him to play, he said. For instance, if he lost $1 million, the casinos would forgive $200,000.
He ended up winning $15 million. The article is interesting throughout, and hat tip goes to Steve Silberman, more on the math here from Kid Dynamite.
Assorted links
1. Do positive fantasies make it harder to achieve your goals?
2. Via Chris F. Masse, Peter Thiel’s whiz kids.
3. Interview with Emmanuel Todd on the Arab Spring and whether Germany is in the core of Europe.
4. Recommended Spanish-language novels, and all the good books coming out this year.
5. The black middle class is more likely to reach the NBA.
6. John Tomasi will be guest-blogging at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
What I’ve been putting down
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, by Robert Bellah.
These are very good books for large classes of readers, just not for me. They have garnered, or will be garnering, stellar reviews. The former, for my taste, covers too many eras, has too much detail on matters I don’t care about, and ultimately chooses the wrong organizing principle for its material. The Economist, however, loved it. The latter has too much general material and doesn’t get to the cutting edge points in a sufficiently ruthless manner. For many people, though, it may be the best introduction to the general area.
By the way, I just pre-ordered Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which looks to be an important book.
What is the economic value of the internet?
There is a new and very interesting study out from McKinsey on this topic. If you get past the press release, however, and give it a closer read it is consistent with stagnation hypotheses, contrary to some claims. The study shows a few things:
1. Most of the economic benefits of the internet are in fact captured in current economic statistics, which I’ve already argued do not look so fabulous. The point is not to blame the internet, as without it things would have been worse. The point is that the internet gains, in absolute terms, haven’t been large enough to produce a rosy picture overall.
2. The direct and indirect economic effects of the internet account for 3.8% of U.S. gdp, as currently measured (p.15). That’s less than many people think and that value is already incorporated in the current gdp measure. The good news — and it is good news — is that there is lots of room for future growth from internet impact. We’ve yet to really organize our economy around the internet, as we someday will, and then the gains will be enormous. In the meantime we are waiting.
3. What about the unpriced consumer surplus gains from the internet? The study considers that too:
In general, this surplus is generated from the exceptional value users place on Internet services such as e-mail, social networks, search facilities, and online reservation services, among many others. This value far outweighs the costs, both actual costs such as access and subscription fees and annoyances such as spam, excessive advertising, and the need to disclose personal data for some services. In the United States, for example, research conducted with the Interactive Advertising Board found that consumers placed a value of almost €61 billion on the services they got from the Internet, while they would pay about €15 billion to get rid of the annoyances, suggesting a net consumer surplus of about €46 billion.
A nice gain, but in an economy with a $14 trillion gdp it’s not that big a deal. It’s also less than the previous Goolsbee and Klenow estimate of about two percent of gdp, for the consumer surplus from internet use. That is not nearly enough to refute the view that median income growth is much slower in recent times, and that’s without adjusting for the problematic status of expenditures on health care and K-12 education. Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan stress this point — the unpriced benefits of internet use — but I don’t see them offering a better number than this rather paltry calculation, now confirmed as low, at least relative to the claims of internet boosters, by two differing sources.
In fairness, I should note that I cannot trace the study cited above. It may be wrong. The Goolsbee and Klenow paper may be wrong, and it is somewhat out of date, from 2006. I think a consumer surplus estimate of three or four percent is entirely plausible for 2011. We’re still left with relative stagnation. After all, penicillin had some consumer surplus too.
Why not let the dead pay for Medicare?
Kevin Drum reports:
Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don’t have to pay it, though. It’s just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you’ve gotten lots of free medical care. If it’s large, you’ll pay for it all. If you’re somewhere in between, you’ll end up paying for part of the care you’ve received.
Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That’s fine. I suspect they wouldn’t end up spending as much as you’d think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn’t it?
There is more at the link.
Open entry schools, the university as forum
I’ve been reading the fascinating A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander et.al., a book which I recommend to all urbanists, all architecture fans, Jane Jacobs fans, and Hayekians. In passing, the authors toss out a proposal for reorganizing modern universities. It has two simple principles:
1. Anyone can take a course…
2. Anyone can give a course…
Maybe that would make Peter Thiel happy. The authors also believe that a university should consist of a series of relatively low buildings, with a lot of pedestrian pathways, with the buildings at fifty foot intervals. (The book is in large part about how the organization of space and construction shapes spontaneous orders.)
It sounds a bit outrageous to turn Harvard into Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, but Harvard admin. could publish a list of approved courses, all other courses you take your chances. There still could be a “Harvard admin.-approved degree,” based on those courses, even if not everyone goes that route. (How many current Harvard classes could keep reasonably high enrollments in the face of such competition?) If you still find this proposal either unpalatable or commercially unpersuasive, are you prepared to admit how much the current university model is based on the idea of exclusion? And how would you square that emphasis with university ideals more generally?