The culture that is Japan there is no great stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Japanese invent a box that can simulate a kiss over the Internet:

The device looks like an ordinary box attached to a computer with a rotating straw. A closer look reveals otherwise. Students at Japan’s Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications have created a small device that uses motor rotations with the aim to simulate the feeling of a kiss over the Internet. Warning: this might be the most disturbing thing you’ll see today.

Upon closer inspection, we learn that the kissing device responds directly to a person’s tongue. On one end, a person rotates the “straw” in one direction and the “straw” on the other end will rotate in the same direction. The result is a powerful tactile response that feels like you’re giving or receiving a kiss. From the demonstration video, the device looks a lot more effective than that concept cellphone that uses a wet sponge to transmit moisture onto a person’s lips.

For the device’s creators at Kajimoto Laboratory, the kissing device has a lot of potential, “The elements of a kiss include the sense of taste, the manner of breathing, and the moistness of the tongue…

But where is the demonstration video?  Can you find it on the site or elsewhere?

For the pointer I thank Natalie B.

Secrecy markets in everything how to know you are living next door to OBL edition

by  Tyler Cowen

The neighbor said if local children kicked a ball into the compound, someone from inside would pay the children for the ball rather than let them step onto the grounds.

From CNN, via MonkeyCage.

From the comments: “Not surprisingly, the kids understood incentives. The lead audio report now on the NYT says that the kids would be given 50 rupees (about $1.12 USD according to x-rates.com) and that they would therefore repeatedly kick the ball over the fence.”

Mexico fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

When the news was announced that Mexicans work longer days than anyone else in the world, many people here were too busy to notice.

“Really?” Marcelo Barrales said, “the longest?”

Mexicans work an average of ten hours a day, paid and unpaid labor, even though the country is far from the world’s poorest.  Belgians work the least number of hours a day, at seven.  It can be argued that these long hours stem in part from the inefficiency of labor in Mexico, but still this should put to rest the cliched notion that in Mexico the work ethic is weak.

Was World War II good for the American economy?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Put aside Bob Higgs’s points about restricted consumption, Alexander Field has another angle:

Had trends persisted in the absence of war, employment, TFP, and labor productivity would all likely have been higher in 1942…housing construction was robust and growing in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and when the postwar housing boom emerged with full force in 1946, it took off from where it had been arrested in 1941. Since the failure of residential construction to revive fully was one of the major contributors to the persistence of low private investment spending during the Depression, its signs of revival in the years immediately preceding the war suggest that had peace continued, investment, output, and employment growth would have continued as the economy reapproached capacity.

…There continues to be a popular perception that war is beneficial to an economy, particularly if it does not lead to much physical damaged to the country prosecuting it.  The U.S. experience during the Second World War is the typical poster child for this point of view.  Detailed research into the effects of armed conflict, however, has usually produced more nuanced interpretations…In that spirit, the research reported in this chapter represents a revisionist approach to the analysis of the Second World War, although one that is not entirely unanticipated.

You can buy Field’s excellent book here and here is my previous post on the work.  Here is Kling on Field, very useful.

Keynes on planning, coda

by  Tyler Cowen in

Russ Roberts responds, and from the comments, Lawrence H. White reports:

In his famous letter to Hayek regarding The Road to Serfdom, after asserting that greater central planning would enhance efficiency, Keynes wrote:

“I should therefore conclude your theme rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue.”

That’s not a gotcha, that’s what Keynes (and many others) believed.  They also believed, unlike some of the more recent and typically more mathematical Keynesian models, that investment was quite unstable and that this instability required us to at least consider some fairly radical remedies.  That’s Keynes’s actual model, not what was usually taught at MIT as the Keynesian-neoclassical synthesis.  Government-sanctioned collusion was another remedy for instability, commonly suggested in the earlier part of the 20th century, although that was not Keynes’s tack.

By the way, when Hayek receives such a letter, he probably wonders if it is from Milton Friedman.  (Move around some years for the counterfactual, if need be.)  Better double check that return address.

Inconvenient possibility?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Usually in such matters it takes a long time for the full and true story to come out, if indeed it ever does, but an MR commentator drew my attention to the following, concerning the courier who led them to the bin Laden hideout:

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The story (1/20) is here, and from Haaretz here is the same point made more explicitly.  I have never been pro-Guantánamo, or for that matter pro-torture (and do note the caveats above), but I am willing to report results which may run counter to my views.  The moral and the practical do not always coincide, and perhaps we should be celebrating just a bit less.  It is possible this is not a totally “clean” victory on our part.

And the big winner is…

by  Tyler Cowen in

Other than Obama, the team that actually killed OBL, and the Indians who warned against Pakistani military and intelligence agency perfidy, I say Twitter was the big winner last night.  The military operation itself was, unknowingly, live tweeted.  The national outpouring of emotion, interpretation, jokes, and analysis came rapidly, even before Obama’s speech started.  There was a short moment of overload but overall the Twitter network held up well.

*Pakistan: A Hard Country*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and excellent book by Anatol Lieven, and there is now more reason than ever to read it.  Here are a few things I learned from the book:

1. For most of the years since 1947, Pakistan has had higher economic growth rates than did India.  Pakistan does not have the same pockets of extreme poverty, or for that matter the extreme wealth.  The level of economic equality in Pakistan is relatively high.

2. Charitable donations run almost five percent of gdp, one of the highest percentages in the world and this reflects the emphasis on alms-giving in Islam.

3. A good quotation from a businessmen: “One of the main problems for Pakistan is that our democrats have tried to be dictators and our dictators have tried to be democrats.”

4. Agriculture pays virtually no tax and the government lends lots of money to businesses and doesn’t seriously ask for it back.  As a result Pakistan collects far less revenue than does India, even comparing areas of comparable per capita income.  If Pakistan were a state of India, it still would be considerably richer per capita than India’s poorest regions, such as Bihar.

5. The Pakistani state is nonetheless a lot more stable than most people think.  In part this is because of the conservative structure of kinship and landholder power in the country.

6. The main threats to the future of Pakistan have to do with ecology and water, not politics.

7. The end of the book has a very interesting discussion about how U.S. actions in Pakistan affect different coalitions, feelings of humiliation, relative status relationships, etc.

Definitely recommended, as are Lieven’s books on the Baltics and Ukraine.

Osama bin Laden is dead

by  Tyler Cowen

My quick take is that that Obama will be re-elected (getting Osama is way more important than Iraq or Saddam in the American mind, attacks on American soil, etc.), at this point the Republicans won’t try to beat him from the center and will thus nominate a more extreme candidate and lose badly, and the most important effects will be on Pakistan, not this country.

What do you think?

p.s. Check out this photo.

Childhood memories

by  Tyler Cowen in

Alex’s post brought back some childhood memories. At school, in sixth and seventh grade, we played a game called “Bombardment,” where you wailed the ball at the other kid’s head, as hard as you could.  If a kid shied away from the ball, the gym teacher laughed at him.

After school, there was a game called, appropriately, “Kill the guy”; now it’s an on-line game.

I played Little League for seven years.  One day during practice I was in the outfield and I missed a catch and the ball smashed into my eye.  It hurt!  And it bruised.  I sat down for a while but was back out on the field for the next session.  I didn’t go home and no one called my mother.  The coach asked “Are you OK?”

One day a poor girl in the Girl Scouts was walking around and selling cookies, when a young man lured her into his house and raped and killed her, a few blocks from our house in Hillsdale.  They organized a Frankenstein-like village hunt, found the girl’s body, and traced it back to the guy, who was sent to jail and remains there to this day.  This didn’t change any of the local norms.

Maybe it’s still all like this, I cannot say.