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.
Assorted links
*The Enlightened Economy*
The subtitle is An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 and the author is Joel Mokyr. This is now the most comprehensive and indeed the currently definitive history of the British Industrial Revolution. Here is a short excerpt:
Despite the protestations of some scholars who call it "a misnomer," the idea of the Industrial Revolution will remain an essential concept in the economic history of Britain and the world. It was, in a narrow sense, neither exclusively industrial nor much of a revolution. But it remains in many ways the opening act of the still-developing drama of modern economic growth coupled to far-reaching change in society.
The main thesis (apart from the comprehensive coverage) is that ideas were of the central importance for the British take-off. Here is the book's website. Here is a blog review. I would not describe the book as "fun" but it is clearly written and does not require the knowledge of a specialist.
There is another new book on the Industrial Revolution, namely Robert C. Allen's The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. It's all about how the British had high wages and cheap energy, a kind of Heckscher-Ohlin approach to why we're not eating mud cakes. It's good enough on its own terms, but it's a) question-begging in parts, and b) startling what a small role ideas play in the basic story. Indirectly, this book is proof that Mokyr's contribution is an important one.
The subsistence wage
Until the broken Haitian government can figure out how to distribute paychecks, the national police have been working for food. That's one meal a day, given to them by the foreigners, that "we have to beg for," said the chief of police.
The article is interesting throughout, as it focuses mostly on how corruption among the Haitian police has plummeted since the earthquake.
Sentences to ponder
The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. [Hilary] Hahn's No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance on Conan, bolstered by blogs and press, sold 1,000 copies.
The full story is here. And:
In early October, pianist Murray Perahia's much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.
I buy a lot of classical CDs, but it's rare that I end up listening to such chart-toppers, instead preferring more obscure performers.
Assorted links
How Haiti could turn things around
I'm not suggesting that the future gains will, in moral terms, outweigh the massive loss of life and destruction, but still the future Haiti might have a higher growth rate and a higher level of gdp per capita. Here's how.
In the previous Haitian political equilibrium, the major interest groups were five or six wealthy families and also the drug trade, plus of course the government officials themselves. None had much to gain from market-oriented, competitive economic development. The wealthy families would have lost their quasi-monopolies and the drug runners would have been pushed out or lost some rents. The wealthy families are not that wealthy and their economic projects are relatively small, at least by the standards of the outside world.
Enter the rebuilding of Haiti. Contract money will be everywhere. From the World Bank, from the U.S., from the IADB, even from the DR. That contract money will be significant, relative to the financial influence of either the main families or the drug trade.
There exists (ha!) a new equilibrium. The government is still corrupt, but it is ruled by the desire to take a cut on the contracts. Ten or twenty percent on all those contracts will be more money than either the families or the drug runners can muster. The new government will want to bring in as many of these contracts as possible and it will (maybe) bypass the old interest groups. Alternatively, the old interest groups will capture the rents on these contracts but will be bought off to allow further growth and openness.
Arguably the new regime in Haiti will operate much like the federal states in Mexico. Corrupt and a mess, but oriented toward a certain kind of progress, if only to increase the returns from corruption.
You will see this in how the port of Port-Au-Prince is treated. Previously the rate of corruption was so high that the port was hardly used. If the port becomes a true open gateway into Haiti (if only to maximize contracts and returns from corruption), that means this scenario is coming true.
The surviving Haitians, in time, might be much better off. Virginia Postrel lays out some theory.