What the brain values vs. what you wish to buy

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have not read this paper (gated full copy here), and I usually get nervous when it comes to brain scan interpretations, not to mention press release interpretations, but even if this has been botched it is still worth thinking about.  A new paper suggests the following:

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that as participants were watching a sequence of faces, their brains were simultaneously evaluating those faces in two distinct ways: for the quality of the viewing experience and for what they would trade to see the face again. 

As the authors put it, experienced value and decision value are not the same.  The main test involves heterosexual men looking at the faces of women and thus one concrete implication, or so it seems to me, is that the pornography men enjoy the most is not necessarily what they are willing to pay the most for.  The authors also note:

…that decision value signals are evident even in the absence of an overt choice task. We conclude that decisions are made by comparing neural representations of the value of different goods encoded in posterior VMPFC in a common, relative currency.

Hat tip goes to MoneyScience on Twitter.

Theory of optimal punishment, Stanley Kubrick edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is from England:

The headmaster of the school where children are forced to listen to classical music as a punishment for bad behaviour said infractions of school rules have dropped by about 60 per cent since he began the special detentions.

"What he's saying in effect is children don't like classical music and we will exploit this fact by using it as a punishment against them," O'Neill said in an interview Wednesday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.

The state school system seems to have abandoned the idea of educating children about great culture, he added.

More good news about Africa

by  Tyler Cowen in

This time it is from Alwyn Young:

Measures of real consumption based upon the ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub-Saharan living standards have, for the past two decades, been growing in excess of 3 percent per annum, i.e. more than three times the rate indicated in international data sets.

I thank an MR commentator for the pointer.  Addendum: Link is now corrected.

My favorite things Grenada

by  Tyler Cowen in

This one may seem like a stumper but in fact it's a breeze.  Here goes:

1. Painter: Canute Calliste, who paints in a naive style.  You'll find four images and a bit of biography here.  I first encountered his work at a Quito biennial in the mid-1990s.  His best works are not on-line.  Here is one other painting by Canute Caliste.

2. Short story writer: Paul Keens-Douglas.  This pick is a no-brainer.  Here is Keens-Douglas telling a story.  Here is Keens-Douglas doing a comedy routine.  I used to have some very good cassettes of him telling folk tales.

3. Musical artist: The calypso genius Mighty Sparrow is usually thought of as coming from Trinidad, but in fact he was born in Grenada.  Here is a YouTube clip.

4. 19th century Haitian revolutionary: Henri Christophe was born in Grenada.

5. Movie, set in: I can only think of one, namely the 1957 Island in the Sun, starring Harry Belafonte, which is well known for its early portrayal of an interracial embrace.  I haven't seen it, but I guess I like it in principle.  Much of it was filmed in Grenada as well.

The bottom line: For an island of about 100,000 people, that's not bad.

Department of Yikes

by  Alex Tabarrok in

According to USA Today:

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Thus, if these numbers are to be believed, federal workers on average earn in wages and compensation 50% more than workers in the private sector doing the same job.  Bear in mind that the federal workers are paid by the private sector workers.  We can't all be insiders. 

The figures do seem large to me, however, and they do not correct for a variety of factors such as age or experience so take them with a grain of salt.

Much cheaper, almost as good

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is part of the problem behind health care cost control, from the Annals of Internal Medicine:

Under conditions of constrained resources, cost-saving innovations may improve overall outcomes, even when they are slightly less effective than available options, by permitting more efficient reallocation of resources. The authors systematically reviewed all MEDLINE-cited cost–utility analyses written in English from 2002 to 2007 to identify and describe cost- and quality-decreasing medical innovations that might offer favorable “decrementally” cost-effective tradeoffs–defined as saving at least $100 000 per quality-adjusted life-year lost. Of 2128 cost-effectiveness ratios from 887 publications, only 9 comparisons (0.4% of total) described 8 innovations that were deemed to be decrementally cost-effective. Examples included percutaneous coronary intervention (instead of coronary artery bypass graft) for multivessel coronary disease, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (instead of electroconvulsive therapy) for drug-resistant major depression, watchful waiting for inguinal hernias, and hemodialyzer sterilization and reuse. On a per-patient basis, these innovations yielded savings from $122 to almost $12 000 but losses of 0.001 to 0.021 quality-adjusted life-years (approximately 8 hours to 1 week). These findings demonstrate the rarity of decrementally cost-effective innovations in the medical literature.

Let me just repeat that last sentence: "These findings demonstrate the rarity of decrementally cost-effective innovations in the medical literature."

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Land of Myanmar, by W. John Kress.  The subtitle sounds so intriguing and then you discover its about the search for rare plants.  But it turns out to be even better than you thought at first.  It's a wonderful introduction to Myanmar, the idea of a scientific quest, and some aspects of botany.  The photographs are beautiful too.  I very much like books which serve up surprising combinations, as this one does.

2. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists.  The color plates are beautiful and favor artworks with large numbers of massed individuals.  The book itself is mostly excerpts of classic texts and it doesn't have much insight into…lists.

3. Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What To Do About It, by Randall O'Toole.  This Cato book is mostly an attack on transportation planning, including a critique of high-speed rail subsidies.

4. Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman.  Short but self-recommending.  It is part of the "(Why X Matters)" series.  Here is one good review.

5. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", by Kyle Gann.  There are over twenty-four recordings of this piece and skeptics can consider that an attempt at competitive rent exhaustion.  Yet probably none of those have come close to David Tudor's presentation of the work at its premiere.

6. Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, by Sam Miller.  Bombay had its book, now Delhi has its.  Recommended, it captures the feel of the place.

Ezra Klein interviews Paul Ryan

by  Tyler Cowen in

EK: And since then, the Congress has stopped it from cutting doctor payments seven times since then. I went back through the record, and you voted for five of those delays.

PR: Oh, yeah! I think we should fix the thing. Don't get me wrong.

That has to do with the Medicare payments "fix," which Congress keeps postponing, often with Ryan's support.  There is much more here.  Cutting spending is hard!

Here are recent developments on cost containment in the health care bill.

Test your moral intuitions, Kunming edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

This was a truly strange article, not only for its content but also for its odd shifts in tone.  It seems that in China there is a theme park of dwarfs who perform for tourists; this reader felt he had stepped into a Brian Barry article.  Here is one sample of what goes on:

And there is the Swan Lake parody, a crowd pleaser in which male dwarfs dress up in pink tights and tutus and wiggle their derrières.

“The first time I wore that, I felt really awkward,” said Chen Ruan, 20, who used to collect refuse with his parents. “But then I got up on stage and people liked it. People were applauding and I felt proud.”

So is this morally OK?  Among other things, the article suggests that this theme park is raising the status of dwarfs, and the disabled, in China, at least relative to how things had been.  You'll note that Chen Ruan, cited above, used to pick up refuse. 

Is it better or worse that some of the dwarfs seem to enjoy the work?  In this kind of "few other good employment options, culture of face-saving and honor, don't insult the boss to prestigious foreigners" setting, are there any employee reports that a reporter actually could trust and pass along at face value?  What is the proper moral stance of a journalist toward a story like this one?

By the way, the piece claims that the park is not (yet?) profitable.