Voodoo bathing ritual
The source article, by Wade Davis on voodoo (I don't agree with everything in it), is here.
In what way is blogging science?
Scott Sumner has a long and thoughtful post. Here is one bit:
According to the Official Method, none of these tidbits matter. But I have noticed that they have had some impact on my readers. They are each slightly persuasive about some aspect of my argument.
It has to be read in the context of the longer post, but it's a very important point. And this:
So that’s the goal of my blog, to constantly use theoretical arguments, empirical data, clever metaphors, and historical analogies that make people see the current situation in a new way.
Read the whole thing. It's one of the best statements of how blogging can make a difference; just don't call Scott a blogger…
The world’s 25 dirtiest cities
Here is the article, here is the top of the list:
1, Baku, Azerbaijan
2. Dhaka, Bangladesh
3. Antananarivo, Madagascar
4. Port-au-Prince (pre-quake? I believe they are now uncontested #1 or will be soon.)
5. Mexico City
Most of the rest are in Africa. If I did the ranking, Mexico City would do much better than number five, since air pollution isn't as bad as the lack of sanitation in cities such as Conakry (a mere #19). And why does Bangui (CAR) get such an idyllic photo? Nor does Google offer up any nasty photos of the place.
Hat tip goes to the essential Rachel Strohm, Twitter feed here.
Obligatory budget post
I keep on hearing about a "pivot," but where is it? Via Greg Mankiw and Arnold Kling, here is Keith Hennessey:
We can draw five important conclusions from this graph:
- At 8.3% of GDP, the proposed budget deficit for 2011 is still extremely high.
- President Obama is proposing larger budget deficits than he did last year.
- For 2011, the most relevant year of this proposal, the President is proposing a budget deficit that is 2.3 percentage points higher than he did last year (8.3% vs. 6.0%).
- Using his own numbers, the President’s proposed budget deficits will cause debt as a share of the economy to increase.
- Under the President’s proposal, budget deficits begin to increase as a share of the economy beginning in 2018.
Adding further detail to (4), the President’s own figures show deficits averaging 5.1% of GDP over the next 5 years, and 4.5% of GDP over the next ten years. They further show debt held by the public increasing from 63.6% of GDP this year to 77.2% of GDP ten years from now. I think it’s a safe assumption that CBO’s rescore of the President’s budget will be even worse.
Addendum: Brad DeLong objects.
Assorted links
1. Another Daniel Lippman profile.
2. Paul Ryan's budget proposal, and critical commentary.
3. McDonald's in Russia now uses the private sector rather than autarchy.
4. A brutal takedown of Stefan Zweig. Unfair, in my view, but worth a read.
Will the price of Haitian art go up or down?
Here's a report on the destruction of Haiti's cultural heritage and many Haitian paintings, including the supreme achievement of Haitian art, the murals in the Episcopalian cathedral. Furthermore the "Nader Museum" in Petitionville has largely been destroyed; that was probably the single best collection of Haitian art.
OK, so the supply curve shifts up and to the left. But will the prices of the remaining stock rise? It's not so simple and that's because of how reputation drives art prices. In part people buy art to be affiliated with something grand and glorious. A so-so Rembrandt is worth more because the first-rate Rembrandts exist. If the first-rate Rembrandts were destroyed, the so-so work might fall in value, not rise.
Art works also require buyers to promote them. If not many people own an artist, not many people are speaking up for that artist. Again, we see the higher quantities can increase rather than decrease price. Arguably Andy Warhol's prices have benefited from Warhol's work being widely held and sold in deep, liquid markets.
Here is Wikipedia on Carel Fabritius and here is his goldfinch.
If you are curious to see some of the Cowen Haitian art collection, go through my home page. (Addendum: Links are broken right now, I'm working on getting them fixed.)
This account of the damage also offers a good slideshow on Haitian art.
What about the data? Natasha and I have bought four Haitian art pieces since the earthquake. Their prices were exactly the same as what we had been quoted before the quake. So far the jury is still out.
Naughty Bits in the Bible
From a review of The Uncensored Bible:
In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang.
This was new to me:
The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”–testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.
I will never be able to listen to George Clinton and Parliament's funkadelic classic, "I just want to testify, what your love has done for me," in the same way again. The album title is interesting in this context also.
How to fall six miles and survive
I found this article fascinating throughout, here is one excerpt:
Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extraÂordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page–an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972, Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulovic was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft and the body of another crew member, landing on–then sliding down–a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive.
Surviving a plunge surrounded by a semiprotective cocoon of debris is more common than surviving a pure free-fall, according to Hamilton’s statistics; 31 such confirmed or “plausible” incidents have occurred since the 1940s. Free-fallers constitute a much more exclusive club, with just 13 confirmed or plausible incidents, including perennial Ripley’s Believe It or Not superstar Alan Magee–blown from his B-17 on a 1943 mission over France. The New Jersey airman, more recently the subject of a MythBusters episode, fell 20,000 feet and crashed into a train station; he was subsequently captured by German troops, who were astonished at his survival.
Whether you’re attached to crumpled fuselage or just plain falling, the concept you’ll be most interested in is terminal velocity. As gravity pulls you toward earth, you go faster. But like any moving object, you create drag–more as your speed increases. When downward force equals upward resistance, acceleration stops. You max out.
It's possible to hit the ground (or whatever) at no more than 120 mph or so we are told. The writer offers another tip: don't land on your head.
Hat tip goes to The Browser.
Another idea for Haiti
Haitians in Canada proposed another excellent idea: government-paid leaves of absence to allow expatriates (employed in government or the private sector) to return and rebuild civil society in their place of birth.
There is more here. I am less sure about this one, largely for reasons of maintenance:
Instead of waiting for someone to build an expensive, centralized power grid, donors could think more flexibly on a smaller scale, using solar panels and LEDs to provide electricity and light cheaply, portably and quickly.
Perspectives
A three minute TED talk on changing perspectives. Enjoyable.
Assorted links
1. Keynes-Hayek rap video with Chinese subtitles.
2. The essential Rachel Strohm recommends development books.
3. Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project hits #1.
4. Credible sources report that JHabermas is fake. Even more credible, note JH reports his email address is not available for the public.
5. Haitians are targeting aid to women.
6. The quest for university rankings favors the biosciences (and experimental economics?)
No Shoes Please and No Debt Relief Either
Sending shoes to Haiti is how not to help. Fortunately, with notable exceptions, this message is getting out. A lot of attention, however, is still being given to debt relief. David Roodman at the Center for Global Development argues that this is merely a more sophisticated version of sending shoes. Haiti's interest charges are on the order of $9 million a year. Sure, holding off on the interest charges is a no-brainer, but the effort going into debt relief far exceeds the potential gains from simple aid not to mention immigration and trade relief. Here, from Roodman, is his argument in a graph:
Why not fix doctoral programs in length?
It's simple: cap the program at a fixed number of years (TC: five?) and let the market clear with whatever people have done in the meantime. It's not fair to people who get sick but if that's the only cost maybe it's still worth doing. (Is there a credible way to make exceptions?) And instead of a dissertation require one good published article.
Anyway, that's the proposal in the new Louis Menand book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.
There is a behavioral argument for this policy — it is anti-procrastination – and a zero-sum status game argument for it, namely that if more people went on the market "unfinished" the stigma would lessen and everyone would save some time. The overall rank ordering probably wouldn't be much different.
But are these people ready? Menand has an effective zinger:
The argument that they need the [extra] training to teach the undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates.
Overall his book is a stimulating read, whether or not you've spent more than five years in graduate school.
*The Cleanest Race*
This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner's shoes. The Workers' Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin — another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.
I liked this bit as well:
The lack of conflict makes North Korean narratives seem dull even in comparison to Soviet fiction. Rather than try to stimulate curiosity about what will happen next, directors and writers try to make one wonder what has already happened. Films introduce characters in a certain situation (getting a medal, say), then go back and forth in time to explain how they got there. Nowhere in the world do writers make such heavy use of the flashback. But we should beware of assuing that people in the DPRK find these narratives as dull as we do. The Korean aesthetic has traditionally been very tolerant of convention and formula. (South Korean broadcasters rework the same few soap-opera plots every year). According to refugee testimony, however, most North Koreans prefer stories set either in the "Yankee colony" or in pre-revolutionary times, with real villains and conflict.
I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:
North Koreans have multiple words for prison in much the same way that the Inuit do for snow.
From the WSJ, here is a joint review of the two books.
Daniel Gross, Me, and the Efficient Market Hypothesis
Daniel Gross is at Davos and writes:
I noticed a piece of gray paper on the floor. It looked like it might
be currency of some sort–certainly not a dollar, but perhaps Swiss
francs or something else. I started to bend over to pick it up, but
then I caught myself. This is the World Economic Forum. It is populated
by hundreds of economists and by thousands of business people schooled
in the tenets of economics. This is possibly the most rational,
profit-maximizing concentration of human capital in the world. These
are the actors who make up an efficient market. And of course adherents
to the efficient market hypothesis famously don't believe in the
concept of found money….
But I'm a
connoisseur of economic irrationality. And so I bent down and picked up
the paper. On one side, the grim visage of Queen Elizabeth. On the
other, Charles Darwin. It was a 10 pound note, worth about $16.25. Just
lying on the floor, unmolested by Nobel Prize-winning economists, CEOs
of Fortune 500 companies, and financial journalists.
Gross concludes the efficient markets hypothesis must be false.
The same thing happened to me once except I wasn't at Davos, I was walking in New York near Wall Street and I saw a green folded up note that looked to be money. I too paused and thought of the old joke that if it was money someone would have picked it up already, but I picked it up anyway and took a closer look…..alas, it was a cleverly folded piece of paper designed to look like money when dropped on the sidewalk, although it was actually an advertisement. Kudos to Eugene Fama, I thought on that day.
Perhaps our different experiences account for some of our differing economics views.
Hat tip to Ezra Klein.