The wisdom of Rocco Landesman
Speaking at a conference about new play development at Arena Stage in Washington on Thursday, Mr. Landesman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, addressed the problem of struggling theaters. “You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” he said. “Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.”
Here are some of the responses from the sector:
“What does he mean there’s too much supply?!?” wrote Trisha Mead, the public relations and publications manager at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. “What does he mean we can’t increase demand?!? Who determines which theater companies are wheat and which are chaff?!?” In another post, Durango Miller, a playwright and director, said: “Why not just increase funding? Maybe the N.E.A. is outdated and should be replaced by another system for funding the arts in the United States. Or maybe the people who are running the N.E.A. should be replaced.”
Assorted links
1. More from Arnold Kling on The Great Stagnation.
2. Kevin Drum on the Kindle version.
3. Predictions about Egypt, from Egyptians, January 2010.
4. How good is Kobe Bryant in the clutch?
5. Markets in everything: Lie back and think of Mother England.
6. Critique of behavioral economics for not being behavioral enough, full paper here.
Five-year average productivity
That is from Paul Krugman. And from Krugman's source, Bart van Ark:
To conclude, there is good reason to adjust the long-term US productivity growth rate downwards.
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?
Egypt facts of the day
The Market Vectors Egypt Index (EGPT) ETF is down 20% since Jan. 14 and down 2.9% today on more than six times the daily average volume. Egypt’s credit-insurance costs have also spiked. According to Markit, a data provider, a credit-default swap to insure $10 million of Egyptian sovereign debt over five years has spiked 33% to $405,000. (Update: the CDS cost has jumped to $450,000 since this post was first made.) It may surprise, given what you see on TV, but that’s still cheaper than similar insurance for Portugal, Ireland and Greece.
The article is here. And:
The Nasdaq Israel Index (ISRQ) is down 1.2% today and 3% in the past 10 days.
*The Order of Public Reason*
That is the title, the author is Gerald Gaus of U. Arizona, and the subtitle is A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. This is a big and ambitious work, broadly in the liberaltarian tradition, mixing Rawls and Hayek, pondering the implications of disagreement, and experimenting with the idea that morality itself has a coercive element. It is Gaus's attempt to lay out the proper foundations for a liberal society and he summarizes the hard-to-summarize book a bit here.
Also new on the market is Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs. I like the title and I like most of his previous books, but I am not finding this one rewarding to read. Here is one previous debate on related material.
Cutting off communications in Egypt
Jeff writes:
The government in Egypt is cutting off communications networks, including mobile phones and the Internet.
The decision to get out and protest is a strategic one. It’s privately costly and it pays off only if there is a critical mass of others who make the same commitment. It can be very costly if that critical mass doesn’t materialize.
Communications networks affect coordination. Before committing yourself you can talk to others, check Facebook and Twitter, and try to gauge the momentum of the protest. These media aggregate private information about the rewards to a protest but its important to remember that this cuts two ways.
If it looks underwhelming you stay home. And therefore so does everybody who gets similar information as you. All of you benefit from avoiding protesting when the protest is likely to be unsuccessful. What’s more, in these cases even the regime benefits enabling from private communication, because the protest loses steam.
Now consider the strategic situation when you lines of communication are cut and you are acting in ignorance of the will of others. The first observation is that in these cases when the protest would have fizzled, without advance knowledge of this many people will go out and protest. Many are worse off, including the regime.
The second observation is that even in those cases when protest coordination would have been amplified by private communication, shutting down communication may nevertheless have the same effect, perhaps even a stronger one. There are two reasons for this. First, the regime’s decision to shut down communications networks is an informed one. They wouldn’t bother taking such a costly and face-losing move if they didn’t think that a protest was a real threat. The inference therefore, when you are in your home and you can’t call your friends and the internet is shut down is that the protest has a real chance of being effective. The signal you get from this act by the regime substitutes for the positive signal you would have gotten had they not acted.
The other reason is that this signal is public. Everyone knows that everyone knows … that the internet has shut down. Instead of relying on the noisy private signal that you get from talking to your friends, now you know that everybody is seeing exactly the same thing and are emboldened in exactly the same way. This removes a lot of the coordination uncertainty and strengthens your resolve to protest.
I would add that today's autocracies hire consultants who advise them on how to best stifle political dissent. Clumsy errors are less common than in times past. That increases the likelihood that the Egyptian government sees these protests as very serious indeed.
Solving the fiscal crisis at the state level?
Moving to dispel claims that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, his supporters in the state's legislature have introduced a bill that would allow anyone to get a copy of his birth records for a $100 fee.
The idea behind the measure is to end skepticism over Obama's birthplace while raising a little money for a government with a projected budget deficit exceeding $800 million over the next two years.
Here is more.
Egypt
There is some chance that 2011 will be the new 1989. Cutting off the internet should signal to the populace that matters are dire and thus it may prove counterproductive. Tullock might say it means they will start shooting soon. It is difficult to put together a "Favorite Things Egyptian," at least for this American, once you get past Mahfouz and music. Intellectually and culturally, Cairo has been punching below its weight for a long time. Fortunately, there has been a resurgence in Egyptian cinema since 2007. When I visited the country in the mid-1990s, I had an overwhelming impression of a cynical populace and a lot of cement. Timur Kuran's work will rise in status and importance. "Catch-up" remains the global story of the last ten to fifteen years.
Assorted links
1. The Economist reviews Timur Kuran's new book.
2. Scott Sumner buys a Kindle and reviews The Great Stagnation.
3. Forbes review of The Great Stagnation.
4. Ryan Avent review of The Great Stagnation.
5. David Brooks coverage of The Great Stagnation.
Are criminals just stupid?
Kevin Beaver and John Paul Wright report:
An impressive body of research has revealed that individual-level IQ scores are negatively associated with criminal and delinquent involvement. Recently, this line of research has been extended to show that state-level IQ scores are associated with state-level crime rates. The current study uses this literature as a springboard to examine the potential association between county-level IQ and county-level crime rates. Analysis of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health revealed statistically significant and negative associations between county-level IQ and the property crime rate, the burglary rate, the larceny rate, the motor vehicle theft rate, the violent crime rate, the robbery rate, and the aggravated assault rate. Additional analyses revealed that these associations were not confounded by a measure of concentrated disadvantage that captures the effects of race, poverty, and other social disadvantages of the county. We discuss the implications of the results and note the limitations of the study.
Hat tip goes to Kevin Lewis. Elsewhere, again via Kevin, people believe they have more free will than do others.
Further assorted links
1. Great Stagnation reviews from Brink Lindsey, Mutual Information, and Pegobry, and more Reihan.
2. Whoops! The flight from specificity. How far can it go?
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything, government style.
2. I am reading the new Brian Greene book and it is very good.
3. Hansonian result, though it does not apply to Robin himself.
The Ethics of Economics
Ed Glaeser has a good post, The Moral Heart of Economics, on the underlying ethical theories of economics. Tyler and I also discuss this isssue in our chapter on ethics in Modern Principles.
Even though the predictions of economics are independent of any ethical theory, there are ethical ideas behind normative economic reasoning. An economist who rejects the idea of exploitation in kidney purchases, for example, is treating the seller of kidneys with respect–as a person who is capable of choosing for himself or herself even in difficult circumstances.
Similarly, economists don’t second-guess people’s preferences very much. If people like wrestling more than opera, then so be it; the economist, acting as economist, does not regard some preferences as better than others. In normative terms, economists once again tend to respect people’s choices.
Respect for people’s preferences and choices leads naturally toward respect for trade–a key action that people take to make themselves better off. As we saw in Chapter 9 on externalities, economists recognize that trade can sometimes make the people who do not trade worse off. Nonetheless, the basic idea that people can make decisions and know their own preferences leads economists to be very sympathetic to the idea of noncoercive trade.
Economists also tend to treat all market demands equally, no matter which person they come from. Whether you are white or black, male or female, quiet or talkative, American or Belgian, your consumer and producer surplus count for the same in an economic assessment of a policy choice.
None of this it to say that economists are always right in their ethical assumptions. As we warned you in the beginning, this chapter has more questions than answers. But the ethical views of economists–respect for individual choice and preference, support for voluntary trade, and equality of treatment–are all ethical views with considerable grounding and support in a wide variety of ethical and religious traditions.
Perhaps you have heard that Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian-era writer, called economics the “dismal science.” What you may not know is that Carlyle was a defender of slavery and he was attacking the ethical views of economics. Economists like John Stuart Mill thought that all people were able to make rational choices, that trade not coercion was the best route to wealth, and that everyone should be counted equally, regardless of race. As a result, Mill and the laissez-faire economists of the nineteeth century opposed slavery, believing that everyone was entitled to liberty. It was these ethical views that Carlyle found dismal. We beg to differ.
Zeno’s paradox
I did get stuck in The Great ???? — have they given it a name yet? — last night. A ten mile commute home took me almost eight hours and from what I have read many people had it worse. I thought of Keynes and liquidity. The worst part came at the end when I saw the car crushed by a large, heavy tree, which also fell over the main road and turned four lanes and two directions into one lane and two directions. For the most part human cooperation held up and people kept their places in line. Bathroom norms evolved (and were improved), and I now know every station on my radio. As the trip continued, the number of car corpses rose.
We at GMU are so dedicated they didn't even cancel classes. And if a nuclear weapon is being launched at DC, I'm simply going down to the basement.