Catch a thief from your armchair and win cash

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the latest from the UK:

Anyone who owns a laptop computer can now fight crime from the safety of their home and win cash prizes for catching thieves red-handed, under a new British monitoring scheme that went live this week.

The service works by employing an army of registered armchair snoopers who watch hours of CCTV footage from cameras in stores and high street venues across the country.

Viewers can win up to 1,000 pounds ($1,600) in cash a month from Devon-based firm Internet Eyes, which distributes the streaming footage, when offenders are caught in the act.

For the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald, who has just published a new book on the sports writing of Gay Talese. 

From another front, S.S. sends me this link for "the culture that is Britain."

Why don’t people rock the boat in early on-line dating encounters?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Well, some of them do.  But many don't.  Dan Ariely writes:

We picked apart emails sent between online daters, prepared to dissect the juicy details of first introductions. And we found a general trend supporting the idea that people like to maintain boring equilibrium at all costs: we found a lot of people who may, in actuality, have interesting things to say, but presented themselves as utterly insipid in their written conversations. The dialogue was boring, consisting mainly of questions like, “Where did you go to college?” or “What are your hobbies?” “What is your line of work?” etc.

…What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from. 

First, email is a bad medium for making and negotiating outrageous claims.  You can't communicate subtleties of tone and teasing and you can't easily do "repair work" if you offend the audience, even assuming you can notice the offense or keep the dialog going after an offense. 

More generally, when I see cautious behavior I ask if some kind of threshold incentive is in place.  Imagine a process where both the writing man and the writing woman have inferred they are above the other's minimum standard for a personal meeting, perhaps for having demonstrated looks, money, status, etc.  Given that a relatively impressive credential already puts each person in the running, on the written exchange each is simply hoping to "break even" for the time being and avoid dismissal.  Draw your own implications as to what attracts people in the on-line dating world. 

Addendum: Robin Hanson offers related comment.

CA Organ Donor Law

by  Alex Tabarrok in

California has a new law creating a live donor registry for kidney transplants and requiring California drivers to say yay or nay on whether they want to be organ donors when they renew their drivers' licenses.  The law was passed with the prodding of Steve Jobs who last year had a liver transplant.

The live donor registry is very good. The required declaration is mixed but I hope it works.  I see it as follows.  The benefit is that if a potential donor has said yes to organ donation then next of kin almost always agree to their wishes so if more people positively affirm that is good.  The cost, however, is that now "no" really means "no" and next of kin will presumably agree to that as well.  Previously, next of kin might have said yes to non-signatories.  Let's use some back of the envelope figures:

100 potential donors
20 signed organ donor cards
80 do not sign but, among these, half the families say yes so 40.

Total: 60 donors.

So with declaration you need more than 60 to agree to be organ donors, i.e. a huge increase in those saying yes.  It could happen if what people say on surveys about supporting organ donation is true but I would have been much happier with even a small incentive to sign.  How about a free iPhone for signatories?  Or at least some more minutes!

See here for more on incentives and organ donation.

Addendum: Nudge blog has some helpful comment–the law appears to be closer to mandated ask than mandated choice.

*Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory* the new Stanley Cavell memoir

by  Tyler Cowen in

To recognize the end of the day and get to bed, I developed the ritual of eating a box of Oreo cookies together with a can of applesauce.  But really the ritual is equally describable as an effort to stop myself from eating the entire box of cookies, a sequence of five (was it?) pairs, each pair stacked in a pleated pliable plastic cup, and from finishing the accompanying applesauce, having conceived the idea that this was not a sensible diet.  I slowed the eating by inventing new ways of going through the cookies.  One way was to nibble around the circumference of a cookie before finishing off the remaining rough-edged center; another was to twist apart the two wafers of each Oreo, eat off the sugary middle spread from whichever of the wafers it largely adhered to, intending to eat only that one of that double cookie.  But each night I lost the battle to stop eating before the package and the can were emptied.  I recognize that to this day I unfailingly at the end of a meal leave some portion of food, if sometimes quite small, on my dish — as if to reassure myself that I am free.

I do the same, I should add.  That passage is from Stanley Cavell, one of America's leading philosophers.  If you're looking for a book which steps outside the usual mode of strict narrative, I recommend this highly, but it will leave many people frustrated.  You can buy it here.

For the pointer I thank David Gordon.

Rejection Therapy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jason Comely writes to me:

Rejection Therapy is a real life game with one rule: to be rejected by someone every single day, for 30 days consecutive. There are even suggestion cards available for "rejection attempts" (although they are not essential to the game).

I designed the game for myself about a year ago because I wasn't getting out of my comfort zone anymore. I was afraid of rejection. Rejection Therapy was a way I "incentivized" getting out of my comfort zone, and being rejected became a desired end result.

Are you comforted to learn that?:

Rejection then must be the sister of death.

And yet…you are not supposed to reject others.  Every blogger should ponder the implications of Rejection Therapy.

Rereading *The Road to Serfdom*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Given all the recent fuss, I picked it up again and found:

1. It was more boring and less analytic on matters of public choice than I had been expecting.

2. Although some of Hayek's major predictions have been proven wrong, they are more defensible than I had been expecting.

3. The most important sentence in the book is "This book, written in my spare time from 1940 to 1943…"  In those years, how many decent democracies were in the world?  How clear was it that the Western powers, even if they won the war, would dismantle wartime economic planning?  How many other peoples' predictions from those years have panned out?  At that time, Hayek's worries were perfectly justified.

4. If current trends do turn out very badly, this is not the best guide for understanding exactly why.

It's fine to downgrade the book, relative to some of the claims made on its behalf, but the book doesn't give us reason to downgrade Hayek.

Bill Bryson’s *At Home*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials.  For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization.  One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay.  In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub — essentially a fraework of mud and sticks — if it was sufficiently bound with lime.  But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness.  During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years…A hurricane in 1634 blew away — literally just lifted up and carried off — half the houses of Massachusetts.  Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in…Even decent building stone was not available in many areas.  When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.

The one thing America had in quantity was wood.

That is all from the new Bill Bryson book, subtitled A Short History of Private Life, which is both entertaining and informative.

Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize

by  Tyler Cowen in

That's for literature, sadly he never had the chance to win a prize for economics, as his political career as a Peruvian classical liberal was cut short by electoral defeat.  He has many fine books but I have two particular favorites: The War of the End of the World (serious and epic, concerning a millenarian revolt in Brazil) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (a fun story and spoof of telenovela culture).  Conversation in the Cathedral is sometimes considered a classic but I find it unreadable.  I suspect his early The Green House will resonate more with Latin Americans.  His last major novel, The Bad Girl, was entertaining but not entirely satisfying and it reminded me a bit too much of an older man writing about sex.  The Feast of the Goat is a very good study of political power.  Here are previous MR mentions of Mario Vargas Llosa.

Here is Wikipedia on Vargas Llosa.  Alex has done a good bit of work with Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of Mario and a prominent writer on classical liberal themes, and perhaps he will relate some of that to us.

Comali foods: tamales and pupusas from El Salvador

by  Tyler Cowen in

They sent me, gratis, non-frozen tamales from El Salvador.  They sell pupusas too, and with improved technologies:

The retort process uses a combination of heat and pressure to “sterilize” the foods, which are sealed in special pouches similar to military MRE’s (but ours taste a lot better 🙂 ). 

They were excellent (I knew immediately when I smelled them) and no artificial preservatives are required.  They will deliver to your door and their web site is here.  I am told there is a 30 percent off discount with use of the code TCowen30; I receive no kickback.

Don't forget the white sour cream.

Canada’s budget triumph

by  Tyler Cowen in

From a new paper by David Henderson:

A federal government runs a large deficit. Deficits are so large that the ratio of federal debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) approaches 70 percent. A constituency of voters have gotten used to large federal spending programs. Does that sound like the United States? Well, yes. But it also describes Canada in 1993. Yet, just 16 years later, Canada’s federal debt had fallen from 67 percent to only 29 percent of GDP. Moreover, in every year between 1997 and 2008, Canada’s federal government had a budget surplus. In one fiscal year, 2000–2001, its surplus was a whopping 1.8 percent of GDP. If the U.S. government had such a surplus today, that would amount to a cool $263 billion rather than the current deficit of more than $1.5 trillion.

Status plateaus

by  Tyler Cowen in

Colin, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

My girlfriend and I were having dinner at a swanky place…and noticed everyone had essentially the same phones–either an iPhone or some version of a Blackberry–which are the same models I see all over campus…It seems to me that with most items like cars, handbags, or houses, there are always more expensive/prestigious items one can get to signal a new tier of wealth, but with phones this is not the case (iPhones and Blackberrys look to be the end of the line, and are not particularly exclusive to the wealthy). We were curious if you could come up with any other items or industries that plateau like this–the only other we could really think of was media/entertainment (plateau at the NYT/WSJ; everyone sees roughly the same new released movies or tv shows). Thanks for your consideration and thanks for keeping up the excellent blog! 

Other than reading blogs, what are further examples?  By the way, here is the world's most expensive cellphone (beware: the pop-up at the link offers audio), at 300k, but I think your wealthy friends will simply laugh at you. Only 28 of them have been produced.

Status plateaus may be profit-maximizing when large numbers of upper-middle class customers wish to believe that they are enjoying the truly cutting edge technology and they are willing to pay for it.  Creating the "iPhone plus for billionaires" would lower the demand for iPhones proper.