*Cosmos*
The author is John North and the subtitle is An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology. Excerpt:
Other alternatives to Einstein's general theory of relativity were the theories of gravitation developed by G.D. Birkhoff, A.N. Whitehead, and J.L. Synge. All of them had cosmological implications. They were symptomatic of a period of great intellectual vitality. They were no doubt partly motivated by a desire to create something comparable with what Einstein had produced. Some ideas of a very different kind were then being put forth by Hermann Weyl, Eddington, and Dirac — the first two in 1930, and Dirac in 1937-38. They seemed to many to be suggesting that cosmological observation was superfluous, and that all could be deducted from the constants of physics. Eddington, for instance, thought that all the dimensionless constants (pure numbers) obtained by suitably multiplying and dividing powers of the constants of physics — the mass of a proton, the charge on an electron, and so forth — turn out to be close to unity, or of the order of 10 raised to the power 79. This vast number he thought might characterize the number of particles in the universe.
This is a truly splendid history of science book, especially if you are snowed in for a weekend. It has plenty of material on the early history of astronomy and on the one topic I know something about — the Aztecs — it seems very good to me and very accurate.
Assorted links
1. One argument in favor of interruption.
2. Shanghai cracks down on pajamas.
4. Map of Europe's alcohol belts.
5. Rogoff: "Greece has been in default roughly one out of every two years since it first gained independence in the nineteenth century."
Revisiting the Marriage Supermarket
In comments to yesterday's post on the effects on dating style of a declining number of university men a number of people asked why a relatively small change in the sex ratio (m:w) from 50:50 to say 40:60 should make such a big difference. In the Logic of Life, Tim Harford gave a characteristically excellent explanation.
Imagine, says Tim, a marriage supermarket. In this supermarket any man and woman who pair up get $100 to split between them. Suppose 20 men and 20 women show up at the supermarket, it's pretty clear that all the men and women will pair up and split the $100 gain about equally, $50,$50. Now imagine that the sex ratio changes to 19 men and 20 women. Surprisingly, a tiny change in the ratio has a big effect on the outcome.
Imagine that 19 men and women have paired up splitting the gains $50:$50 but leaving one woman with neither a spouse nor any gain. Being rational this unmatched woman is unlikely to accede to being left with nothing and will instead muscle in on an existing pairing offering the man say a $60:$40 split. The man being rational will accept but this still leaves one women unpaired and she will now counter-offer $70:$30. And so it goes.
If you follow through on the logic it becomes clear that in the final equilibrium no married (paired) woman can be significantly better off than the unmarried woman (otherwise the unmarried woman would have an incentive to muscle in with a better deal) and so because the unmarried woman gets nothing the married women can't get much more nothing. Thus when the sex ratio is 20:20 the split is $50:$50 and when the sex ratio is 19:20 the split is more like to $99:$1 in favor of the men.
The key simplification of the marriage supermarket is that the next best option to marriage (pairing) is worth $0–thus there is a long way to fall from the equal sex ratio equilibrium of $50. If the outside option is worth more then changes in the sex ratio will have smaller effects. Nevertheless, the logic of the marriage supermarket explains why a relatively small change in the sex ratio can lead to a large change in sexual and other mores affecting the marriage equilibrium.
“When Politics is Stuck in the Middle”
That's the header of my New York Times column today, here are some excerpts, starting with the health care issue:
The point here is not to belittle or praise the president, but to point out that his hands are tied. The biggest leftward move in American economic policy occurred during the Roosevelt and Truman years, when the Democrats had the upper hand for five consecutive presidential terms. Because of depression and war, people were looking for real change. Competitive forces in politics were relatively weak, and the Democrats had the chance to make their policies stick.
The Supreme Court‘s recent ruling on campaign spending also comes into clearer focus through the median voter theorem. The court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. Critics fear that the political influence of corporations will grow, but some academic specialists in campaign finance aren’t so sure.
For all the anecdotal evidence, it’s hard to show statistically that money has a large and systematic influence on political outcomes. That is partly because politicians cannot stray too far from public opinion. (In part, it is also because interest groups get their way on many issues by supplying an understaffed Congress with ideas and intellectual resources, not by running ads or making donations.) It is quite possible that the court’s decision won’t affect election results very much.
Here are the concluding two paragraphs:
The median voter theorem doesn’t predict that the legacy of the Obama administration will be a wash. But it does imply that we might find the most important achievements in areas that don’t always linger on the front page. For instance, the president’s ideas on education, which involve accountability and charter schools and pay for performance, may please the American public and thus make their way into policy. And because education transforms the knowledge and interests of the median voter for generations to come, such acceptance could make for a lot of other improvements.
If you’re looking for change to believe in, and change that will last, the odds are best when political competition is pushing the world in your direction.
Jacob Weisberg has a not unrelated column. And, for another perspective, here are the comments over at Mark Thoma's blog. A few further points:
1. "How tough Obama is" matters less than is usually portrayed. That is the fallacy of anthromorphizing the outcome of political battles. Obsessing over either positive or negative evaluations of key actors probably interferes with one's abilities to understand underlying structural forces.
2. Even the Supreme Court usually tracks voter sentiment reasonably well.
3. On the health care issue, I don't think the electoral calculations of the Democrats are over.
The economics of supermarkets in snow storms
Bryan Caplan raises an excellent puzzle, following his visit to the supermarket (I can confirm similar observations, even earlier in the day):
They were out of milk and bread, but there was still plenty of cheese and chocolate. That was easily explained – people knew they could shop again in a few days, so they only needed to stock up on staples. But the more I looked around, the more puzzled I was.
Here's what I noticed: For any given type of product, the most popular brand always sold out first. There were no Eggo waffles, but plenty of Wegmans brand waffles. All the national brands of hot dogs and sausages were gone, but there were plenty of obscure sausages still on the shelves. If you broadened the categories, the pattern remained. In produce, all the bananas were gone, but there were still plenty of apples.
You might say, "What's the puzzle? Of course the most popular stuff sells out first." But that's a feeble explanation. After all, if X is ten times more popular than Y, then you'd expect stores to simply carry ten times as much X as Y. Why would X sell out faster in a blizzard if stores have already taken its greater popularity into account?
I see it like this. When visits to the store are in "normal times," the store weighs "mass goods" vs. "niche goods" when stocking the shelves. Some niche goods will be given shelf space because they get some minority of customers into the store in the first place. (I go to Whole Foods for Spelt Flakes, two or three key cheeses, and my favorite dark chocolate. While I'm there, I end up paying the higher prices for their milk and green peppers, neither of which is better for me than competing products at Shoppers Food Warehouse.) If the store stocks too few niche goods, it attracts too few niche-oriented customers and loses money on milk, meat, etc.
Note also that the niche buyers tend to hold stocks of their favored goods, so if they have a sudden, unexpected supermarket trip, they don't necessarily need to buy more.
Enter the snowstorm. People are forced to visit the store, more or less. The previous calculations of mass vs. niche goods are no longer appropriate for the new emergency. The store, temporarily, would prefer to have more mass goods and fewer niche goods. The niche goods served the function of "motivating 47 visits a year rather than 23" but in the new short run they are nearly useless for this purpose. We will see too many of them left on the shelves.
Read Bryan's comments section as well. I pondered the "rate of restocking" answers, but slow turnover and slow inventories imply a higher profit margin (if the product can compete for shelf space) and I believe for this to work it has to invoke customer heterogeneity in some manner, as I have done above.
Addendum: Imagine the same problem in the context of a book store. There is an emergency edict which requires everyone to read three newly purchased books over the next week. Borders will be swamped, They will end up short on bestsellers, not their niche books.
Yet another Haitian worry
Most of the sanatorium’s several hundred surviving patients fled and are now living in the densely packed tent cities where experts say they are probably spreading the disease. Most of these patients have also stopped taking their daily regimen of pills, thereby heightening the chance that there will be an outbreak of a strain resistant to treatment, experts say.
There is a tuberculosis clinic in Port-au-Prince, but of the 20 doctors and 50 nurses who worked there, only one nurse is showing up for work. The others have either died, are injured, are dealing with family problems, fear the collapse of the building, or they fear the heavy work burden and the chance of infection. The full story is here.
Assorted links
Supply and Demand
The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating.
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges…Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority – that I know of.”
Only at the IVYs and universities with engineering schools does the sex ratio tend to even out (no doubt for obvious, albeit politically incorrect reasons), which in itself will have consequences for future sexual mores. A number of universities would like to institute affirmative action for males.
Economists’ petitions
Dan Klein, Carrie Milton, and David Hedengren are starting a new project, namely a study of petitions signed by economists. Their list is here, can you add to it? This is part of a longer-term project to understand the behavior of economists and to treat us as rational, maximizing agents, not just disinterested truth-seekers.
I wonder why institutions bother to generate petitions signed by economists. Is it to influence the world? To signal which economists are on their side? To cultivate better connections with economists and create an excuse to contact them and affiliate with them? Something else?
I've signed petitions once or twice but in general I don't like doing it, in part because I don't understand the game I am playing in doing so.
Relations
The source article is here.
Zero price markets in everything
The first time I entered ChatRoulette–a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world–I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind.
That's the premise, the actual story is at this link. Here is one excerpt:
The first eighteen people who saw me disconnected immediately.
Recommended.
Assorted links
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
Bryan Caplan responds to criticisms of libertarianism
He makes many points, here is one of them:
E&O might be right that cynicism about government perversely increases support for government. But if so, libertarians shouldn't attack the public's justified cynicism. Instead, they should help people see the logical anti-government conclusion of their cynicism. Academics who are cynical about government generally are anti-government; see for yourself at the Public Choice Society meetings. Why not teach laymen to make the same connection?
I worry when I read this. Most of all, it is surprisingly meliorist; I once read a book that suggested voters were doomed to irrationality (albeit to varying degrees). If voters can be taught the correct sophisticated mix of cynicism and pro-liberty sentiment, can they not be taught to support good policies, thus making democracy a well-functioning system of government? The E&O criticism strikes at the heart of an important tension in libertarian thought. Outcomes which might be described as "good libertarian" also require important public goods to be produced at the level of overall public sentiment; there's no getting around that.
Admittedly, being pessimistic about public sentiment under democracy does not a priori mandate being pessimistic about the ability of public sentiment to support and maintain more libertarian settings. (You might for instance think that the public good can be produced under some settings but that democracy per se corrupts public opinion, because of its internal workings, electoral pandering, etc.) Nonetheless, I've yet to see good, well-fleshed out arguments to support the split claim Caplan is proposing, namely that public sentiment can be produced to support good libertarian outcomes but not good democratic outcomes.
Addendum: Caplan responds.
What I’ve been reading
So much has happened in the world lately that I've neglected to keep you posted on which books have crossed the threshold. Here are a few of the more memorable ones:
1. R.W. Johnson, South Africa's Brave New World. In the U.S. there is only the Kindle edition, but I ordered a British edition through the library. This is a comprehensive political history of the country since the fall of apartheid; I thought I wouldn't finish it but I did.
2. Juan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless. It's odd that such a splendid author is read so little in this country. Beware, though — this one lies in the territory somewhere between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It is very powerful for those inclined in this direction and now I can see why his name in mentioned in connection with a Nobel Prize.
3. Steven C.A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution. A clearly written, well-argued book, which on top of everything else is better than most books on the Industrial Revolution, hardly its main area of focus. The main point is that the Glorious Revolution was more radical than is commonly portrayed and it represented the culmination of a struggle between two very different kinds of modernizing forces in England. Chapter 12 — "Revolution in Political Economy" — is a gem. This is a very impressive book.
4. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
5. Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. The premise — an alternative literary version of Homer's story — sounds contrived but I was surprised at how good and how moving this was. Here is one good review of the book.
6. Kent Annan, Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously. What is it like to be a Christian missionary in Haiti? This is a surprisingly insightful and moving book, one of the best Haiti books but of general interest as well. Most of all, it's about the author's struggle with himself. Chris Blattman likes it too, here is his review.