Assorted links
David Hume on the posts of honour
Were MOLIERE and CORNEILLE to bring upon the stage at present their
early productions, which were formerly so well received, it would
discourage the young poets, to see the indifference and disdain of the
public. The ignorance of the age alone could have given admission to
the Prince of TYRE; it is to that we owe the Moor: Had
Every man in his humour been rejected, we had never seen
VOLPONE.
That's from Hume's Of The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. I discuss related points in my What Price Fame? The proximate pointer is from Dan Klein.
Markets in everything, law of one price sucking arbitrage edition
The relationship between Colombia and Venezuela has long been a tense one, but there is still arbitrage across the border. You may recall, of course, that Venezuela has heavy gasoline subsidies and thus cheap fuel:
On arrival in Colombia, he found a stall set up by the side of the road where he regularly sells his fuel.
A 20-year-old "pimpinero" – as those who siphon off fuel are known – takes the petrol from Juan's car by sucking it out of the tank with his mouth and a hose, seemingly oblivious of any potential health risks.
The transaction is successful and Juan leaves with about $7-worth of Colombian pesos for what cost him about 50 US cents in Venezuela.
Recently, Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez announced that Venezuela would not be renewing an agreement on subsidised fuel with Colombia.
Here is the full story and I thank Stan T for the pointer.
Why are Arabic streets so narrow?
I can't say I'm fully convinced by this explanation but at least it is an explanation and it refers back to early medieval times:
The other important feature of the Great Mosque was that, as a space, it was closed off to the outside. Roman cities were structured by wide streets leading to central forum areas, to which processions led and where public participation could be considerable, as continued to be the case in Constantinople for centuries. Amphitheatres (in the West), theatres and racetracks were other major venues for public activity, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople carried on this tradition for a long time. In the Islamic world, the mosque courtyard took over from all of these; major political events, like collective oaths of loyalty, took place there, not in any secular location. And the Arab states did not use processions as a major part of their political legitimization; the assembly in the mosque courtyard was sufficient for that. The need for wide boulevards ended; pre-Islamic Syrian and Palestinian colonnades were quite quickly filled in with shops in the eighth century, some of them commissioned as public amenities by caliphs. The narrow streets of Islamic cities resulted directly from this, for there was no public interest involved in keeping them clear from obstructions like vendors' stalls, beyond a certain minimum (enough for two loaded pack animals to pass each other, later jurists said). Public display came to be focused on the mosque, and secondarily, rulers' palaces and city gates, rather on the cityscape as a whole…The caliph and his advisers were nonetheless making a set of conscious symbolic and political points by organizing the Great Mosque as they did; and the way the public space in Islamic cities change, to focus so exclusively on mosques…would have seemed to them auspicious and fitting.
That's from Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. If you're wondering why I'm skeptical I suppose the key question is how much weight to place on the mere fact that Wickham a) seems to be certain, and b) in general knows what he is talking about. What would count as a test? Is a systematic comparison possible with Christian or otherwise non-Islamic cities in the Middle East from the same period?
Here is a related post on donkeys.
Serial monogamy and hypergamous women
In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men
were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry
multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper
Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and
counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the
greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who
had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of
life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who
worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher
reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than
either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of
wifetime total.
Here is more. I believe those last two words — "wifetime total" — should in fact be "lifetime total." This was interesting:
Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female
serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with
the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality
mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the
strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast,
the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the
likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.
“We’re so wedded
to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women
won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said.
“But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically
choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic
situation goes up and down.”
Dare one whisper "hypergamy"?
Africa fact of the day
About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa
— still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European
average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about
two thirds of Africans are literate — a level achieved in Spain only
in the 1920s.
Here is more. The article makes additional interesting observations.
Against satiation
Why not apply behavioral economics to s**? C., an MR reader, writes to me:
The theory, put plainly by me, is that the female (or male) partner in a couple is never cuter or more loved than just before fertilization, so why fertilize as much as we do? Why not once a fortnight or so (with sex without satiation 2x a day in between)?
I am told this will preserve true love forever. Here is a related article. Here is a related book, which I have yet to read. Here is the main Google blast on the topic.
How many of you read this and then revise downwards how much you think you desire true love forever?
Antitrust and Marginal Revolution
Bryan Caplan asks under what conditions would the antitrust authorities prosecute me and Tyler? When we raise our price? When we require MR readers to promise not to read any other blogs? When we merge with a competitor? Or when we predate by producing so many high-quality posts at such a low price that it forces other blogs out of business? (heh, isn't that what we are doing right now?)
As Bryan points out, raising price wouldn't cause legal problems but all the other actions would. Why?
Assorted links
1. How much will TARP have cost?
2. Google trends: Wolfram Alpha.
3. Within a company, the powerful think that rules are more important.
4. Which countries are hardest for informed people to find on a map? Kiribati appears to come in first; source here.
Will there be another Milton Friedman?
Dan Klein, guest-blogging at AustrianEconomists, poses the question and says no, there will not be a classical liberal advocate of comparable stature. At least not anytime soon:
With
the postwar re-awakenings, bold thinkers defied the cultural ruts of
their times. They rediscovered pieces of the liberal understanding.
Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Tullock, Rothbard, Kirzner, Alchian,
Sowell, Coase, Bauer, Simon and Demsetz developed new statements of
parts of liberal wisdom. Because it had been dead and buried, it now
seemed fresh and original. They earned status as epic figures by fresh
pioneering and academic kudos. But what they formulated and taught to
all of us was the low-hanging fruit of all that had been forgotten. I’m
not saying that everything they teach had been taught 150 years prior.
But a lot of it had, and the basic verities pretty much all had….
I don’t think that a clone of Milton Friedman could today become Milton Friedman. To get on in Econ he’d have to do a lot more math, and identify with “normal scientists.” Back in the day, Hayek, Coase, and Buchanan could eschew math and still end up with Nobel prizes. Not today.
Normal scientists won’t embrace you academically if you don’t seem like their
kind. You would have to become their kind. You wouldn’t develop liberal
vision and motivation. Or, if you did you wouldn’t become first among
your peers at a top department (even, that is, if you had the
endowments of a Milton Friedman).
The culture generally is becoming more fragmented, because of technology. But technology is making the academic discipline more integrated and monolithic, even at the international level. There is no “freshwater” vs.
“saltwater” and so on. It is like the baseball player market, one big
pyramid. The top departments are alike and the rest strive to maintain
their standing in the pyramid.
Regardless of academic standing, how is the modern clone of Milton Friedman to cut
a figure? The low-hanging fruit has been plucked and digested by the
liberal movement. A new young brilliant dynamo could write a nice book
like Free to Choose or Road to Serfdom, but who would care? It’s all available in another dozen books that have appeared since 1960.
There is more at the link and of course you can see the link to David Hume's ideas about the posts of honour being filled. I agree with Dan.
Andy Warhol would be happy
David Reilly at Bloomberg notes that the pricing of credit default swaps on both the US government debt and Campbell’s is the same…
Here is the link. Hat tip goes to TheBrowser.
Very good sentences
That’s right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.
That's from Tom Lee, my source was here.
Nova Scotia bleg
Natasha and I lucked out with frequent flyer miles and soon we will have two lovely days in Nova Scotia, starting in Halifax but with a rental car. What should we do? Where should we eat? Your thoughts would be most welcome. I've never had a visit to Canada which was less than excellent and that includes a good fifteen trips at least.
Against obviousness
Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is
obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it
to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such
things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so
clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the
wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are
hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have
the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the
implications it seems to.
That's from Katja Grace. Here is a good post on murder and evil.
Addendum: I liked this bit too:
Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social
institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read
as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty
because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve
got’. Better ideas?
What I’ve been reading
1. The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen. This book is 415 pages of intelligent Sen-isms. Key themes are the importance of public reasoning, the plurality of reasons, and the possibility of an impartial approach to major ethical questions. We also learn that in 1938 Wittgenstein was determined to go to Vienna and give Hitler a stern lecture; he had to be talked out of it. At the end of it all I was more rather than less confused about what impartiality means. I don't blame that on Sen, but that says more about the book than any particular comment which I might make. It's a very good introduction to Sen's ethical thought but it's ultimately the Wittgenstein anecdote which sticks with me.
2. Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon. This tripartite mystery about reinventing yourself has received rave reviews and Amazon readers are strongly positive. I read about one hundred pages and thought it was ably done but of no real substance.
3. How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry, by Adrian Colesberry. My god this book is sick and I feel bad even telling you about it. It's exactly what the title promises and it has no business being discussed on a family-oriented economics blog. The language is explicit and the content is disgusting. It's also brilliant, funny, and unique. How often do I see a new approach to what a book can be? Once you get past the language and topic, it's actually about narcissism, why empathy is scarce, how we form self-images, how men classify and remember their pasts, and why management fad books are absurd.
4. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit. For many people
this may be a good book but I could not read far into it. The main
thesis is quite interesting, namely that people forms immediate islands
of community and cooperation during very trying times. The examples
include the San Francisco and Mexico City earthquakes, 9/11, and
Hurricane Katrina. But I found the ratio of information to page was
too low for my admittedly extreme tastes.
Here is an interesting bit on how emergencies inspire crowd cooperation, not panic.
5. Das Museum der Unschuld, by Orhan Pamuk. That's The Museum of Innocence in English, out in late October, but I found the German-language version in Stockholm. It's in his "Istanbul nostalgic" mode rather than his "I'm trying to be like Italo Calvino" style and it promises to be one of his very best books.