China estimate of the day
As much as 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product relies on construction, he said. Rogoff said in February a debt-fueled bubble in China may trigger a regional recession within a decade.
The entire article deals with China pessimism more generally.
College students are working less hard, it seems
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report:
Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.
An earlier, different and ungated version is here. A closely related paper, by the same authors, is here.
Changing Views on Organ Prohibition
I spoke recently at the Kidney and Urology Foundation of America on using incentives to increase organ donation. Also speaking was Nancy Scheper-Hughes, the courageous UC Berkeley detective/anthropologist responsible for busting international rings of organ traffickers.
Scheper-Hughes is well known as an opponent of kidney vending, especially because it has often involved the exploitation of poor people in the developing world (fyi, there is no question that exploitation has occurred even if you take the view, as I do, that payment per se is not exploitation.) In her impassioned talk, Scheper-Hughes presented many pictures of poor people with large scars.
Thus, I was very surprised that Scheper-Hughes favors a trial of compensation for deceased donation and is even supportive of a trial for compensated live donation saying:
"There are penalties for buying, selling and brokering the sale of organs in this country, but still it goes on, often with an attitude of 'don't ask, don't tell.' I believe that if the laws are not going to be followed, then the laws should change. First, though, a controlled study must take place, in an ethical manner, with a sample of volunteer organ donors being compensated appropriately."
As with alcohol and drug prohibition, many people who do not favor organ sales are coming to recognize that a regulated market or compensation system could be preferable to an illegal market.
Addendum: My powerpoint slides Using Incentives to Increase Organ Donation, cover the problem and some potential solutions which are being adopted around the world. Also included at the end are some slides especially designed for teaching this material in a principles of economics class.
India black markets in everything
A dirty little secret that most Indian politicians don't discuss is the thriving cow smuggling trade from their Hindu-majority nation, home of the sacred cow, to Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where many people enjoy a good steak. The trade is particularly robust around the Muslim festival of Eid.
India has outlawed cattle exports, but that hasn't prevented well-organized traffickers from herding millions of the unlucky beasts each year onto trains and trucks, injecting them with drugs on arrival so they walk faster, then forcing them to ford rivers and lumber into slaughterhouses immediately across the border.
The story is here. Here is information on the price differential:
A $100 medium-size cow in Jharkhand is worth nearly double that in West Bengal and about $350 in Bangladesh. Indian residents along the border complain that the markup also attracts illegal migrants from Bangladesh, who steal cows at night and dart back home.
In a bid to stem the rustling, the Murshidabad local government announced a cow-licensing system in 2007. Cows were issued photo IDs.
In theory the "border is sealed" but in reality the guards are often corrupt and accept bribes to allow the illegal migration.
Scott Sumner reports
I actually looked at all 32 economies with per capita income above $20,000/year (i.e. as rich as Portugal.) Interestingly, just as Denmark was number one in both markets and civic virtue, the same country placed dead last in both the free markets and civic virtue rankings. And what is the country with both the lowest level of civic virtue and the least reformed statist economic system among 32 developed countries on four different continents?
You’ve probably guessed it by now . . . Greece.
Read the whole post, which is interesting throughout and more about economic liberalism than about Greece.
The best 100 Arabic books?
Here is one list and here are the top five:
1 The Cairo Trilogy by Egyptian (Nobel-prize winning) author Naguib Mahfouz. Yes, of course it’s available in English: Trans. William Maynard Hutchins, Everyman’s Library, 2001.
2 In Search of Walid Masoud by the Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. This is available in English, translated by by Adnan Haydar & Roger Allen. Syracuse University Press, 2000. Also, Ghassan Nasr’s translation of Ibrahim Jabra’s The Journals of Sarab Affan, published by Syracuse University Press, was a runner-up for the Banipal translation prize in 2008.
3 Honor, by the great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. As far as I can turn up, this has never been translated into English. Ibrahim’s Zaat, The Committee, and Stealth are easily available from AUC Press, AUC Press, and Aflame Books. The Smell of It was translated, too, but it’s long since out of print.
4 War in the Egyptian Homeland, by the Egyptian Yousef Al-Qaeed has not been translated. (Oops! Hilary notes that War in the Land of Egypt by Yusuf al-Qa’id–see where a non-standard transliteration will get me–was published by Interlink in 1997, translated by Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley. Yes, and my title translation was lame. Worse, I’ve read that translation….)
5 Men in the Sun, by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, was translated by Hilary Kilpatrick and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in 1998.
Hat tip goes to Literary Saloon.
Assorted links
1. Greeks don't always pay their taxes.
2. Interview with the new Business Week editor.
3. Via Chris F. Masse, GetPivot.com, YouTube on it here, pretty neat, start with the video.
4. Mankiw on a VAT.
5. At the Fed, what kind of jokes do they laugh at?
6. The Chilean torture colony (incredible story).
7. Markets in everything, escaped gorilla edition.
The legal system in Zimbabwe
Victims of crime in Zimbabwe's capital city Harare are now allowed to ferry the alleged perpetrators of those crimes from prisons to court after the state prisons service ran out of fuel, according to local reports Thursday.
Conditions have improved significantly in Zimbabwe's 42 jails since last year when an estimated 1,000 inmates had died in the first six months of the year of disease and neglect. But the Department of Prison Services still cannot provide transport to take prisoners awaiting trial to court.
The story is here (or try this link) and I thank Craig Richardson for the pointer. Here is Craig on the collapse of Zimbabwe.
Greece fact of the day
Already, the government’s proposals for deep spending cuts have stoked strong resentments in a country where one out of three people is employed in the civil service that, until now, has guaranteed jobs for life.
Here is more.
When do you see free refills on drinks?
Jacob, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
When I last visited New York City, I was annoyed that most restaurants there do not offer free refills on soft drinks. Why is this? An easy answer is that it is due to the fact that most restaurants do not have soda fountains, but this explanation is unsatisfying as it does not explain the underutilization of soda fountains. In Europe it has been suggested previously on the blog that this phenomenon is due to high taxes on sugar, etc. but I do not think this applies in NYC.
Since I don't ask for refills, I can't vouch for the empirics, but let's say that's true. The first-order economic prediction is that drinks are sometimes used to charge for table space in the restaurant, a'la the Lott-Roberts paper. The more that land costs, the more that table space costs the restaurant. New York City establishments are usually crowded. That means they want to keep on charging you for holding the table and that means no free refills.
That's just a guess. Do they have lots of free refills in North Dakota?
Ameyaltepec black bean stew
I find this recipe improbable, but I enjoy it and it is cheap, easy, healthy, and eco-friendly. A version of it was first served to me by the de la Rosa family and I believe it was cooked by one of the daughters-in-law of Felipe de la Rosa.
Pour two cans of Goya black beans into a pot and let them simmer over low heat. In a separate pan, heat four fresh jalapeno chiles and one not-too-large cinnamon stick in canola oil, Mexican cinnamon of course. After a few minutes, stick that in a blender with enough water to make it work. Pour the blended mix back into the simmering black beans. Let simmer a bit more. Toss in a small amount of sliced white onions with five minutes to go (optional).
Serve with rice or fresh tortillas and squeeze some lime over the top. See if your local Latino market will sell you Mexican Coca-Cola.
When did Greek economic policy turn bad?
Stan Tsirulnikov forwards to me this very interesting paper (JSTOR, gated for many of you). Here is an excerpt from the summary:
For twenty years up to 1974, Greece enjoyed rapid growth, high investment and low inflation; during the next twenty years, growth and investment collapsed and inflation became high and persistent.
After 1974, debt and deficits rose sharply as well, and later EU transfers helped postpone the necessary fiscal adjustments. At this same time Greece was becoming more democratic, in part because the previous autocratic arrangements were collapsing. The figure on p.150, representing the difference between the two periods, is a knockout. And after 1974, the average rate of gdp growth goes from 7.1 percent to 2.1 percent.
The full reference is "The Two Faces of Janus: Institutions, Policy Regimes and Macroeconomic Performance in Greece," George Alogoskoufis, Economic Policy, Vol. 10, No. 20 (Apr., 1995), pp. 149-192.
Addendum: Here is an ungated copy.
Assorted links
What should be the penalties for oil spills?
The US Supreme Court has struck down a $2.5 billion punitive damages award against oil giant Exxon for its role in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
The high court said the award should be reduced to the amount of compensatory damages in the case – $507.5 million.
That was from June 2008. Here is a more general history. Googling "exxon valdez punishment managers" does not yield obvious answers (what other problem does that remind you of?). The CEO, Lawrence Rawl, stayed with the company four more years until the mandatory retirement age of 65. Do you know more?
Here is one report on the BP CEO.
The new Arizona immigration law
Here is a perspective from Megan McArdle:
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to this law, in fact, if it required the police to check the immigration status of every single person they pulled over, without any gauzy "reason to believe" fig leaf to cover up what's really going on.
Raise your hand if you think that law could have passed in Arizona.
Now, anyone whose hand is raised, contact your psychiatrist immediately. You need to check the dosage on those meds.
If you think that immigration is a pressing problem, then the place to enforce it is in areas of life that are already regulated pretty intrusively: border crossings, employment, landlord/tenant relations. These are places where enforcement can be stepped up quite dramatically without massive intrusion into the ordinary lives of law-abiding citizens. But quasi-criminalizing looking different . . . well, it's not just wrong. It's un-American.