The economic theories of the MLA
A resolution calling for full- and part-time faculty members to “be eligible for tenure” and expressing the view that “[a]ll higher education employees should have appropriate forms of job security, due process, a living wage and access to health care benefits” passed in a 81-15 vote, but not without concerns from delegates that the wording went too far – or not far enough.
Ian Barnard, an associate professor of English at California State University-Northridge, said he wanted to see the resolution extended to include a call for all faculty to be eligible not only for tenure but also for full-time employment. Simply voicing support for a lecturer to continue to be guaranteed one course per semester was, he said, “really weak … a way for us to cop out,” for departments to avoid paying for health benefits and for adjunct faculty to continue bouncing around among many jobs just to make ends meet.
The full story is here. Why don't journalists demand something similar? You can pinch yourself, but it really is 2010.
By the way, here are some facts:
In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are.
Terrorists and false positives
Matt Yglesias calculates:
…monitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.
Public Domain Day
Today is Public Domain day and James Boyle reports:
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451, a “fireman” is a man who burns books “for the good of humanity.” Written at the height of the Cold War, the book paints a shockingly dystopian picture of a culture at war with its own printed record, one deeply infused by Bradbury’s love of books. When the book was written, Bradbury got a copyright term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years if he or his publisher wished. Most authors and publishers did not bother to renew – very few have a commercial life longer than a few years. That meant that about 93% of books and 85% of all works from 1953 passed into the public domain within 28 years. But Bradbury’s book was a commercial success. The copyright was renewed and as a result it would have been entering the public domain tomorrow – January 1, 2010 – Public Domain Day.
You could reprint it, make a low cost educational version, legally create a braille or audio book edition, even base a new film or play on it. All without asking permission or paying a fee. But copyright law has changed since then. Copyright terms have been twice retrospectively extended. Now, Fahrenheit 451 is not slated to enter the public domain until 2049.
Markets in Everything: Placebos
Is there any drug that helps more conditions with less risk than a placebo? Now you can buy placebos. The site actually has some good information about placebo studies.
Hat tip: Metafilter.
Peter Boettke’s announcement
As of January 1, 2010, we are changing our name to "Coordination Problem". This name change is symbolic as well as substantive. The term "Austrian economics" has become as much a hindrance to the advancement of thought as a convenient shorthand to signal certain methodological and analytical presumptions.
…The name Austrian economics has been lost as a focal point for a tradition of economic scholarship, and is now a focal point for something else. We have to let it go.
There is much more at the link. I believe this is a wise move and I congratulate Pete for his intellectual savvy and courage. One result of the internet, I think, is that it makes almost everyone smart more eclectic, whether in terms of substance or presentation.
How to capture an idea
From Joanne McNeil, this is one of my favorite blog posts in some time. Excerpt:
I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough?
…Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian‘s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it.
…The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control.
It's best to read the whole thing and then save it to one of your folders.
By the way, Michael Nielsen has asked me how I assemble information. I read about 10-15 blogs a day and two or three major news sources and three or four link-intensive sites, such as The Browser. I receive a lot of emails from readers, which almost always I pursue. I've optimized my Twitter feed to find interesting links, which includes following Michael. Twitter has decreased the amount of time I spend browsing on the web. Most of all, I read lots and lots of books and plenty of magazines, in numerous areas, plus journal articles in fields I work in.
African Successes
From Shanta Devajaran at the World Bank’s blog Africa Can…End Poverty, a post on African Successes.
In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.
A very interesting list of examples and case studies follows. My colleague at the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has also edited a recent book on this theme titled, Lessons from the Poor.
Question: How does focusing on successes change our view of development?
Hat tip J-J Rosa.
Assorted links
2. Village Voice best of 2009 jazz list and here is another good jazz list.
3. www.oliversacks.com is now up.
4. Peter Berkowitz reviews the new George Nash book on the conservative movement.
5. England's greatest composer?
6. Thomas Boswell: "Long ago, I asked Gene Mauch what was his worst day was as a manager. Random question. But Mauch actually thought about it, then said, "The day you realize you care more than the players do."
Russia Plans to Save Mother Earth
Russia's space chief said Wednesday his agency will consider sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth.
Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.
When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37.
Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.
Excellent news! Here is my earlier post, Asteroid Deflection as a Public Good.
Do we find sectoral shifts in the job market data?
Menzie Chinn discusses the evidence on sectoral shifts hypotheses. See also the piece by Valletta and Cleary.
These are intriguing and useful studies but I don't think they get at the core of the matter, mostly because sectoral shifts and aggregate demand shocks are so closely intertwined in this recession.
Here's a very simple story. The prices of homes and stocks fall, plus there is some panic, so people spend less. On the surface, that's an AD story, following from an economy-wide negative wealth effect. But it's also a sectoral shifts story, because people are not cutting spending proportionately on all items. For instance luxury consumption and debt-financed consumption have been hit especially hard, not to mention real estate and financial services (for other reasons). And since I do not expect a quick rebound of real estate or stock prices, this is more or less a permanent change in sectoral priorities. Still, in the data the AD shock might well absorb most of the "credit" for what happened.
We're also seeing job losses in virtually every sector. It's not for instance a "sectoral shift away from services and into matchstick production and tungsten." It's a shift out of jobs which are revealed as unprofitable and a lot of people not knowing where the new jobs will be created.
If someone wants to insist that "this is really an AD shock, not a sectoral shift," I'm not so keen on fighting to keep one term over the other. I would insist, however, on an issue of substance, namely that not all AD shocks are alike. If we are going to switch terminology, it could be said that this is a real AD shock and not just a nominal AD shock. (Though there have been nominal AD shocks too.) A nominal AD shock can be offset more easily by goosing up some mix of M and V and restoring the previous level of nominal demand. If you want an example of a nominal AD shock, imagine a more neutral change in monetary variables and indeed those have happened in the postwar era. Or read David Hume's parable of the money under the pillow. In those cases you don't need to make people feel wealthier in real terms, you just need to get the flow of spending up again. Today, part of the problem is that people feel less wealthy in real terms and that influences the content of their spending and investment decisions.
When a real AD shock comes, policy still should be expansionary in response, but there is an important difference. In absolute terms, nominal expansion won't much help the labor market, which still has to reallocate workers from some sectors to others, given the collapse in asset prices and expectations.
You'll see indirect recognition of this from many current Keynesian writers, when they talk of the jobless recovery or fear that the economy will fall back next year after the stimulus money runs out. In general I agree with those points. Yet these writers are less willing to consider the implied conclusion that a bigger stimulus won't much help — and may hurt — the longer-run adjustments which are required. Boosting MV will restore employment only to a very limited extent. It's still the case that recovery will require a great deal of sectoral readjustment and that will take a good bit of time.
The Fed as fiscal authority
We sometimes describe fiscal policy as determining the overall level of the public debt, while monetary policy determines the composition of that debt between money and interest-bearing federal obligations. By that definition, the Fed has clearly now entered the realm of implementing fiscal policy, by issuing debt directly in the form of interest-bearing reserves, reverse repos, and now term deposits.
That's from James Hamilton. His upshot?:
I fear that as this marriage between fiscal and monetary policy becomes consummated, an amicable divorce is not the most likely outcome.
My advice would be the sooner the Fed can return to plain vanilla central banking, the better.
Regulatory solutions from Emanuel Derman
I had a fantasy in which the Fed and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) switched roles.
If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning and shut its doors, the TSA would announce that all banks henceforth begin their business day at 10 a.m.
And, if a terrorist managed to get on board a plane between Stockholm and Washington, the Fed would increase the number of flights between the cities.
The piece is here and the pointer is from Felix Salmon.
Keep Momma on the Train!
Today, Paul Krugman writes, under the headline "Stop, you’re killing me" the following:
Eight and a half years ago, when I dubbed the first Bush tax cut the Throw Momma from the Train Act of 2001,
I didn’t really think that we’d get to the point where there would be
strong financial incentives for wealthy heirs to bump off their parents
before the legislation expired, and the estate tax was reinstated….[but] it’s really happening.
As Paul might say, uh no. Or at least not yet. The estate tax goes away in January of 2010 so the story today is that the rich have an extra incentive to keep momma on the train or, as the WSJ correctly puts it, Rich Cling to Life to Beat Tax Man. (What happens in 2011, however, is another story although the law will almost certainly be changed by then.) Paul, it seems, just can't stop blaming Republicans for killing people or maybe he just had to make the story fit his Monty Python clip.
Assorted links
1. Ross Douthat defends the filibuster; here is Will Wilkinson on the same.
2. Most Kindle best-sellers are free.
3. The year's best and worst: a Ukrainian perspective.
4. People are reading more not less.
5. Revisionist history of the Ivy League?
Moving essay by Tony Judt on ALS
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs–since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing–nothing–that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
But then comes the night. I leave bedtime until the last possible moment compatible with my nurse's need for sleep. Once I have been "prepared" for bed I am rolled into the bedroom in the wheelchair where I have spent the past eighteen hours. With some difficulty (despite my reduced height, mass, and bulk I am still a substantial dead weight for even a strong man to shift) I am maneuvered onto my cot. I am sat upright at an angle of some 110° and wedged into place with folded towels and pillows, my left leg in particular turned out ballet-like to compensate for its propensity to collapse inward. This process requires considerable concentration. If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.
Read the whole thing. I thank The Browser for the pointer. Here is previous MR coverage of Tony Judt, an excellent thinker and writer.