Victorian street food

by  Tyler Cowen in

Victorian street food was a huge industry.  In the north you would find tripe sellers; I remember the one in Dewsbury market that sold nine different varieties of tripe, including penis and udder (which is remarkably like pease pudding).  Another popular street food was pea soup with, according to where you lived, either pig’s trotters or bits of ham chopped up into it.  Peas boiled in the pod and served with butter were similarly popular.  Stalls known in my youth as whelk stalls also sprang up, selling jellied eels, whelks, winkles and prawns, all by the pint or the half-pint.  You could splash a bit of vinegar on them and eat them at the stall or take them home with you.

That is from the new and excellent A History of English Food, by Clarissa Dickson Wright.  This book also offers up a good deal of confirming evidence for Paul Krugman’s prior hypotheses about English food.

Markets in everything but is there a core?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ireland would need to get a significant reduction in its debt burden in order to get any referendum on new European budgetary rules passed, Minister of State for Finance Brian Hayes has said.

“The idea that we could have a referendum without that agreement, on a substantial re-arranging of our debt, wouldn’t fly,” Mr Hayes said in an interview with the Sunday Business Post .

“We would have to have that in place before we put the question (to the people) and that’s beginning to be understood at an EU level, which puts us in a stronger position,” he said.

Story here, via Economistmeg.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. John Gray and many others try to redesign the banknotes, slide through the show.  Some are quite good.  Here is the one from Audrey Niffenegger.

2. More on the euro carry trade, note I am not an optimist on this, I simply note it is a plan of sorts.  Via Interfluidity, here is lots on financial repression, important read.

3. Zizek on Coriolanus, and my 2006 blog post on the individual mandate.

4. “There are even allegations that the Ukrainian justice minister’s official car was illegally appropriated in Germany…A number of years ago, the Ukrainian government decreed that the state could sell confiscated cars that were stolen in other countries or add them to its motor pool. This even applies when the vehicles are on an Interpol list. In other words, Justice Minister Lavrynovych wouldn’t even be violating Ukrainian laws by driving a car that was stolen in Germany.”  Story here.

5. Tumbleweed markets in everything.

Google ghost books

by  Tyler Cowen

If you Google “Peter Temin economics of antiquity,” the book seems to exist (Princeton University Press 2011?), but none of the clickthroughs seem to yield anything.  I call them Google ghost books.  If PUP clears this up, I am happy to pass along the answer.  The mere fact that I would Google this at random suggests there is a strong demand for the book, from me at least.

In the meantime, here is Peter on financial intermediation in the early Roman empire (pdf).

Addendum: I am told that a real, non-ghost book will come out in the Fall of 2012, exciting news.

The quality gradient

by  Tyler Cowen

“In assassinations, there are gradations of respect,” said Gladki. “The lowest is strangling. If you strangle someone, it is a sign of severe disrespect.” Using a pistol, he said, is “50/50” – kind of an OK, but not brilliant way to be killed. “And then there is the Kalashnikov. To be shot by a Kalashnikov assault rifle is the ultimate form of respect. It is a very good death for a Russian.”

From the same FT article, “Who Runs Russia?”, don’t forget this:

Indeed, the basic functions of organised crime – protection rackets, narcotics, extortion and prostitution, have increasingly been assumed by the Russian state.

Roman Empire More Equal than the United States

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire, a careful paper published in the Journal of Roman Studies in 2009, Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen estimate the size and distribution of the Roman economy at its demographic peak around the middle of the 2nd century c.e.

We conclude that in the Roman Empire as a whole, a ‘middling’ sector of somewhere around 6 to 12 per cent
of the population, defined by a real income of between 2.4 and 10 times ‘bare bones’
subsistence or 1 to 4 times ‘respectable’ consumption levels, would have occupied a fairly
narrow middle ground between an élite segment of perhaps 1.5 per cent of the population and a vast majority close to subsistence level of around 90 per cent. In this system, some 1.5 per cent of households controlled 15 to 25 per cent of total income, while close to
10 per cent took in another 15 to 25 per cent, leaving not much more than half of all income for all remaining households.

Thus, in Rome the top 1.5% controlled 15-25% of income while in the United States around 2007 the top 1% controlled 23.5% of income thus suggesting slightly more inequality in the United States. Scheidel and Friesen calculate a Roman Empire gini coefficient of .42-.44 again perhaps slightly less than the U.S. coefficient of around .4-.45 depending on source.

Interestingly, the Roman State did not manage to collect that much:

Given a GDP of somewhere
around HS17–19bn, annual state expenditure of approximately HS900m would have
represented an effective tax rate of approximately 5 per cent of GDP, which is the same as
for France in 1700. This finding confirms Hopkins’s claim that the imperial government
did not capture more than 5 to 7 per cent of GDP and that Roman taxes were fairly low.
The overall public sector share of GDP was somewhat larger depending on the scale of
municipal spending, while the overall nominal tax rate had to be higher still in order to
accommodate taxpayer non-compliance, tax amnesties, and rent-seeking behaviour by
tax-collectors and other intermediaries. Moreover, we must not forget that Italy’s immunity from output and poll taxes required the public sector share in the provinces to exceed
the empire-wide average. These various adjustments allow us to reconcile our GDP estimate with reported nominal taxes of around 10 per cent of farm output on private land
reported in Roman Egypt and somewhat higher rates in less developed regions where
enforcement may have been more difficult.

(Thus, despite the aqueducts Rome may not have done that much for the people after all.)

Hat tip to Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile who has further discussion.

Is there a Peltzman effect from AIDS treatment in Africa?

by  Tyler Cowen

Somewhat, it seems.  Plamen Nikolov, a job candidate from Harvard, reports (pdf):

AIDS treatment provides enormous mortality benets to infected individuals but because it immunologically insulates people from more risk-taking, it could, in theory, stir perverse behavioral responses. Therefore, the response of sexual behavior to AIDS treatment in Africa is an important input to predicting the path of the epidemic. Existing estimates from observational studies suggest limited behavioral response, but they fail to take into account possible differences across individuals seeking treatment. Using an encouragement design field experiment conducted in South Africa, I estimate behavioral responses subsequent to AIDS treatment. I find moderate negative responses to treatment for HIV + individuals and mixed results for HIV

The economy that is Singapore, disloyalty cards

by  Tyler Cowen

Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come across an interesting twist on the idea. In Singapore, a collaborate scheme aims to benefit eight of the city’s best independent cafés with the Be Disloyal disloyalty card.

The Be Disloyal disloyalty card — created by digital creative agency Antics, blogger Cortadito.sg and eight of Singapore’s independent coffee shops — was designed to encourage consumers to discover different coffee venues while bringing businesses together to grow as a vertical. From September until the end of this month customers can pick up a disloyalty card from one of the eight participating cafés. The card is stamped each time they purchase a coffee from one of the other seven cafés and, once the card is full, they return to the original café to receive their free coffee.

Competing with large chain brands can be difficult for small businesses, but teaming up with similar smaller companies can create stronger competition. Inspiration here for independent businesses in any industry!

The link is here and for the pointer I thank @amelapay, and more from her here.

The ongoing development of the Austro-Chinese business cycle

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s not the only title I could have given this post, here goes:

Beijing’s suburban Miyun County is going to build a large European-style town within five years and no one will be allowed to speak Chinese there, said the county mayor.

Wang Haichen said a local village would be turned into a 67-hectare English castle with 16 courtyards of unique houses. It will offer visitors souvenir passports and ban Chinese speaking to create the illusion of being abroad, Beijing News reported today.

So far 4.5 million yuan (US$708,300) has been invested to transform 16 peasant courtyards in Caijiawa Village into English-style dwellings. Wang told the newspaper that each of the 16 peasant households had received 30,000 yuan of government subsidy.

The county mayor insisted that one courtyard had been turned into a boutique hotel. “We built a laundry center to supply clean bed linens to the 16 households free of charge,” Wang said. “We are considering to offer them bicycles and electric bikes next year.”

The article is here, and for the pointer I thank M Kaan.  I predict it will end badly!