Jeff Ely on torture and commitment
Here is an easier-to-follow version of his argument on torture:
A big problem with torture in general is that its effectiveness is inherently limited by commitment problems. If torture leads to quick concessions then it will cease quickly in the absence of a concession (but of course continue once a concession has revealed that the victim is informed ). But then there would be no concession. And as we wrote last week, raising the intensity of the torture only worsens this problem.
Assorted links
1. Should Bernanke be reappointed?, a symposium, including yours truly and others.
2. Markets in everything egads.
4. Via Leonardo Monasterio, stylized facts about cities.
5. Weight-loss cutlery edition.
Why should the FDA ban drugs?
305 Economists Called to Smart Questionnaire on the FDA:
Daniel Klein, Jason Briggeman, and Kevin Rollins have designed a questionnaire about the economic rationale for the policy that makes new drugs and devices banned until individually permitted by the FDA. Klein and Briggeman present the questionnaire and the list of economists. Will anyone provide a sensible market-failure rationale for the policy?
The link is here, take a look. I believe Congress should eliminate the "effective" part of the "safe and effective" clause, dating from 1962. If the question is allowing people to experiment with all pharmaceutical products, I see a few possible arguments (I'm not necessarily endorsing them) against doing that:
1. There will be more successes but also a greater number of bad events. This will possibly cause people to lose confidence in pharmaceuticals, just as many crazy theories circulate about vaccines and many people refuse them or refuse them for their children.
2. Our courts are not up to handling a greater number of liability suits, whether in terms of the quality of those courts or their ability to handle the case load. See Andrei Shleifer's recent paper on regulation as a substitute for an imperfect court system.
3. I am a fan of Robin Hanson's paper "Warning Labels as Cheap Talk: Why Regulators Ban Products." This was the piece Robin presented when we hired him, and it later appeared in JPubEc. The main point is that a verbal governmental warning: "We're really not sure this is safe, caveat emptor!" is not usually credible and people will regard the product as safe, thinking the government would not have otherwise let it come to market.
4. Parents cannot be trusted with their children.
Still, I think there is a good case for greater freedom for choice when it comes to pharmaceuticals.
An introduction to Haitian music
Here are my picks:
1. The best song to start with: Buy Wyclef Jean's Welcome to Haiti. "Ou Marye" (track 8) is my single favorite song these days, sadly I cannot find it on YouTube but you can download it. Start there. This one also has strong Haitian influence. This is a kind of Haitian rap, with a good video. Here's a super-fun mix of ragga and compas, with Buju Banton and T-Vice.
2. Three groups which are best seen live: Ram, Boukmans Eksperyans, and Tropicana. Tabou Combo is another.
3. The best Haitian collection: the Konbit! CD. The voodoo-linked Rhythms of Rapture is quite good, as is the more acoustic Haitian Troubadours.
4. The best recent Haitian group and recording: Ti-Coca. I like all their CDs but my favorite is a blue and orange one I bought in Paris which I don't see on Amazon. I think they're better on disc than live.
5. Best Haitian musical star to dance to: Sweet Mickey. For a while he was selling cell phone cards, but he has returned to the world of music.
6. The classic father-figure of Haitian music: Nemours Jean-Baptiste. Try this song on YouTube.
7. The most comprehensive historic collection: Alan Lomax in Haiti, 9 CDs, of highly varying quality but always interesting.
8. Best-known Haitian songstress: Emeline Michel, sometimes called the Joni Mitchell of Haiti. Here she is doing "Many Rivers to Cross."
9. Best Haitian rara collection: That's the noisy. discordant music they play leading up to Carnival. This would be my pick. Overall it's a vibrant genre.
10. What else?: Haitian children's songs are often quite good, Haitian rap I barely know, and Haitian gospel is a vital area, though hard to capture on disc. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Haitian music.
11. Non-Haitian contributors: The group Simbi, a mizak rasin band founded in 1987, is made up of Swedes, who play an exact copy of Haitian voodoo rock.
12. Leading Haitian contributor to German rap scene: Torch. Here is Torch, rapping in German.
Some of you may recall the third and fourth sentences in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures (now on Kindle by the way):
"The founder of Kassav, the leading Antillean group in the funky style of zouk, stated: "It's this Haitian imperialism [i.e., the popularity of the groups] that we were rising against when we began Kassav." Governments responded with protective measures to limit the number of Haitian bands in the country."
The wisdom of Garett Jones, a continuing series
The key to controlling spending is permitting more earmarks (sic).
The link to his tweet is here. Can you guess at Garett's underlying model?
Not From The Onion
The 9,000-student K-8 district this week pulled all copies of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary after an Oak Meadows Elementary School parent complained about a child stumbling across definitions for "oral sex."
The decision was made without consultation with the district's school board and has raised concerns among First Amendment experts and some parents.
Other parents and Menifee residents, though, have praised the district's decision, saying a collegiate-level dictionary is inappropriate for younger children.
Words fail me and now apparently also the students in Menifee.
The rise of the capitalist kibbutz
This isn't new news, but it's a nice comprehensive discussion of the power of commercial forces:
Today, Ms Ozeri brandishes a business card that identifies her as the "global sales coordinator" of Aran Packaging, a company that produces liquids packaging for the food industry. Located on the kibbutz, and owned by its members, the business boasts sales of almost $40m (€28m, £25m) a year and ships its goods to 35 countries across the world. Ms Ozeri receives a salary which she is not only entitled to keep, but that is also considerably higher than the pay awarded to farmhands and workers on the assembly line. She says Aran's pay scale is broadly similar to other private sector companies.
Equality, once at the core of the kibbutz ideology, has been breached in other ways, too. Tasks that used to be performed by kibbutzniks regardless of their education and background – such as washing the dishes – are today largely the preserve of hired workers from outside the community.
Attitudes towards business have also changed radically. As recently as the 1980s, Nachshon members voted down a plan to open a petrol station on a nearby highway, because it would force the proud kibbutzniks to "serve" motorists.
Today, many kibbutzim not only have thriving businesses – including in the tourism industry – that operate exactly like other private enterprises, but some have even decided to embrace the capital market: 22 kibbutz companies are currently listed on stock exchanges in Tel Aviv, New York and London. With annual sales worth Shk37bn ($10bn, €7bn, £6bn), the kibbutz companies account for about 10 per cent of Israel's industrial production.
The full story is here.
I was surprised this number was such a big one
Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years.
I meant to blog this the day I read it but somehow I forgot to; here is one source. I haven't seen it receive much discussion in the econ blogosphere. For one thing, it's a sign that the union wage premium isn't so stable.
Assorted links
1. The economics of child soldiering.
2. The fake colors of Hubble photography.
3. Should you randomize your watch?
4. David Brooks on the populist addiction.
5. Map of the Great Recalculation.
6. Some recent work on money and happiness.
7. Carlos the Jackal, from a French prison, demands a legal say over his biopic.
The “spending freeze”
There's not much to say in terms of the economic issues, the real lesson is that politics is more constrained than many people think. Berating Obama for his lack of courage or his "failure to get tough" is simply denying or postponing this fundamental realization.
All policy recommendations need to be analyzed within this framework. How will your preferred policy (this includes deregulation and the like, by the way; I am not aiming this barb in any particular direction) play out when, in the middle of the action, government turns out to be extremely constrained in a way you do not like.
If you are surprised by this Obama announcement, that is indirect evidence that some of your other policy preferences are incorrect.
Haiti fact of the day
In 2009, the cost of dealing with construction permits in Haiti was about 570% of income per capita.
Here is the source post, with further information. Had I mentioned that perhaps as much as eighty percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is homeless?
More criticisms of comparativeness effectiveness research
There is a growing awareness among researchers, including advocates of quality measures, that past efforts to standardize and broadly mandate "best practices" were scientifically misconceived. Dr. Carolyn Clancy of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the federal body that establishes quality measures, acknowledged that clinical trials yield averages that often do not reflect the "real world" of individual patients, particularly those with multiple medical conditions. Nor do current findings on best practices take into account changes in an illness as it evolves over time. Tight control of blood sugar may help some diabetics, but not others. Such control may be prudent at one stage of the malady and not at a later stage. For years, the standards for treatment of the disease were blind to this clinical reality.
Orszag's mandates not only ignore such conceptual concerns but also raise ethical dilemmas. Should physicians and hospitals receive refunds after they have suffered financial penalties for deviating from mistaken quality measures? Should public apologies be made for incorrect reports from government sources informing the public that certain doctors or hospitals were not providing "quality care" when they actually were? Should a physician who is skeptical about a mandated "best practice" inform the patient of his opinion? To aggressively implement a presumed but still unproven "best practice" is essentially a clinical experiment. Should the patient sign an informed consent document before he receives the treatment? Should every patient who is treated by a questionable "best practice" be told that there are credible experts who disagree with the guideline?
That's Jerome Groopman, the full article is here, interesting throughout, and I thank someone — alas I have mislaid the email address – for the pointer. My apologies to the person who sent this in.
The Boom and Bust Rap
The Keynes-Hayek rap video is finally here and it's brilliant. The lyrics cover Keynesian economics and Austrian business cycle theory very well but what I liked best were the many ways in which the visuals, the story and the music subtly and sometimes not so subtly (!) parallel the economics–e.g. note what happens to Keynes after the big party!
It's clear that a lot of thought went into integrating the music, the story and the lyrics in order to make the most of this medium and I give my colleague Russ Roberts and John Papola much props.
Real estate and transportation in Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince is now a city where most people are sleeping outside at night (estimates put it at 80 percent of the residents). I drove back to our camp just after dark a couple of nights ago, rushing to meet our own night-time curfew. At street corner after corner, people had blocked access to their blocks by placing stones in the way. They didn't want vehicles rushing blindly in and injuring sleeping families. I looked up these blocks and saw winding ribbons of re-created bedrooms, demarcated with bedsheets and string, as far as my eyes could see in the dark.
That's Monte, via Andrew Sullivan.
Why do the Chinese save so much?
Yes, it's Eric Barker day. Here is another entry from Eric's blog. We all know that there are many more men in China than women and here is what that equilibrium looks like:
“The increased pressure on the marriage market in China might induce men and parents with sons to do things to make themselves more competitive,” Wei says. “Increasing savings is one logical way to do that, to the extent that wealth helps to increase a man’s competitive edge. Parents increase household savings mostly by cutting down their own consumption.”
Wei worked with Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., to see if his hypothesis held up, comparing savings data across regions and in households with sons versus those with daughters. “We find not only that households with sons save more than households with daughters in all regions,” Wei says, “but that households with sons tend to raise their savings rate if they also happen to live in a region with a more skewed sex ratio.”
The effect is significant. The household savings rate in China rose from about 16 percent of disposable income in 1990 to over 30 percent today, which is much higher than most countries. About half of the increase in the savings rate of the last 25 years can be attributed to the rise in the sex ratio imbalance. “It’s a very high ratio of savings to income,” Wei says. “The comparable savings rate in the United States would be 2 or 3 percent before the crisis, and about 6 percent since the crisis.”
Even those not competing in the marriage market must compete to buy housing and make other significant purchases, pushing up the savings rate for all households.
The original source is here. You'll note, by the way, that low wages and a high savings rate are the fundamental reasons for global imbalances, not Chinese currency policy. If this is true, one implication is that the Chinese attempt to cut population leads indirectly to those global imbalances. If you "fear China" (whatever that means), the current imbalances might be better than the relevant alternatives, namely a China with high and growing population and all the environmental problems which that involves.
There's plenty of talk from people wanting to make China "do it right" but only rarely do those discussions recognize all the constraints which China is laboring under.