More Engineers in Jihad
Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.” (Tyler blogged this paper several years ago.)
Here is the latest bit of evidence:
Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at the University College London to study engineering.
Assorted links
2. What determines how well you keep resolutions?
3. Which are the most remote places on earth? A map.
5. Markets in everything: chemotherapy cooking classes.
Markets in everything China fact of the day
Wanted: One live-in protester, $146 a month, no days off.
When the managers of a Beijing restaurant marked for demolition were too busy to fight it, they posted an Internet ad and hired a stranger to stay there around the clock. The job seems to be a first for China, where frenzied urban construction has led to violent evictions, protests and even suicide.
Huddled on a makeshift bed in the trash-strewn, freezing restaurant, Lu Daren said he once worked for a demolition crew and understands their tactics.
"I'm tired," the 46-year-old said Thursday, after a long night of fending off the latest visit from what he suspects were hired thugs by the landlord. "Tired, tired, tired." He stays – wrapped in blankets, reading the newspaper or writing idle poetry, occasionally taking short walks_ because he thinks the restaurateurs have been treated unfairly.
The full story is here and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.
Books of note
1. David W. Galenson, Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art. We've covered Galenson in these posts.
2. Richard A. Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. Due out in April, this book is 400 pp. The press release notes it "presents what Judge Posner has learned about the econom since writing [his last book]…[and he] thinks we're in for a financial aftershock because of the amount of money the government has poured into the economy to save it."
3. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, new translation by Breon Mitchell. I've only browsed this, but it appears to be far better than the earlier English-language translation.
4. Scott Berkun, Confessions of a Public Speaker. If you get only one good tip from this book, it's worth it.
5. Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics. The critics include Bernard Williams, David Schmidtz, Jan Narveson, Michael Huemer, and myself'; Singer responds to each essay.
Christmas Bonuses for Fannie and Freddie
The Obama administration tried to sneak this one under the radar by making it official on Christmas Eve. The Washington Post did a good job catching the story:
The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.
…But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.
The compensation packages, including up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's chief executives, come amid an ongoing public debate about lavish payments to executives at banks and other financial firms that have received taxpayer aid. But while many firms on Wall Street have repaid the assistance, there is no prospect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will do so.
Merry Christmas
Assorted links
1. Recent work in Austrian economics.
2. 121-hour long lecture (with breaks), the longest ever?
3. Scott Sumner on movies, great post.
4. Is it possible that 225,000 Haitian children are slaves? Read this too: "Researchers said the practice of young servants, known as 'restavek', is so common that almost half of 257 children interviewed in the shantytown of Cite Soleil were household slaves. The report found that most of the children are sent by parents, who cannot afford to care for them, to families just slightly better off."
Merry Christmas from The Boss (and me)
Assorted links
“Late believers”: more rational than you think
It's from The Washington Post, but for a moment I thought I was reading Robin Hanson:
Santa's spell hasn't been broken for Fiona Penn, either. A 12-year-old student at Carl Sandburg Middle School in the Alexandria part of Fairfax, Fiona is aware of the ubiquitous shopping mall Santas and the fact that some presents arrive via a UPS truck, not from the sky. But she chooses to believe that her Santa is different.
"The mall Santas, they change. They get hired and fired. But he's the real one," she said.
The full story is here.
Addendum: Fiona responds to critics in the comments section.
Nicaragua notes (avoid walls!)
The keys to eating well here are: avoid walls, seek corn, and bow down to the finest white creams and cheeses you are likely to find. They use cabbage frequently and well and they are not afraid of sour tastes. Fried chicken is a treat and they sprinkle white cheese on top of that and on your french fries. It is an under-mined cuisine.
Horse and donkey carts have not disappeared. Few people speak English. Many women carry baskets on their heads to transport goods. I stayed in what is arguably the country's nicest hotel and my room was $100 a night. The place was empty.
Nicaragua is wealthier than Honduras but much poorer than El Salvador or Panama. Here is a garbage dump in Managua, La Chureca. The economy is likely to shrink two percent this year. On the bright side, the drug trade doesn't (yet?) have so much of a hold. The lower income classes seem to do better in terms of social services than in many other countries of comparable wealth.
Leon has one of the best Latin American town squares for cute children, street musicians, balloons and ringing bells, and flirtatious teenage social life. The Sandinista murals are maintained. There are few international chain stores of any kind outside of Managua and even most of Managua is under-chained. People will insist of getting you back the change you are due, even when you tell them to keep it because you don't want to wait for them to get it from their uncle across the street.
Appreciating the country boils down to how much you can enjoy a very direct feeling of genuineness all around; Nicaragua is a hidden jewel, at least for tourist visitors.
I did not see anyone smoke, not once.
What does programmer productivity look like?
I am unable to judge the details of its contents, but this article intrigued me. The key question is why pay across highly-talented and lesser-talented programmers isn't more unequal. (That's a question I'd like economists to study more generally, given the disparities in productivity across individuals within a firm.) Here is an excerpt:
Software output cannot be measured as easily as dollars or bricks. The best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code and they certainly do not work 10x longer hours.
Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. They may realize the problem they’re being asked to solve doesn’t need to be solved, that the client doesn’t actually want what they’re asking for. They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat. But just when they are being their most productive, nobody says “Wow! You were just 100x more productive than if you’d done this the hard way. You deserve a raise.” At best they say “Good idea!” and go on. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights. Or to put it negatively, it may take a long time to realize that others are programming with sound and fury but producing nothing.
For the pointer I thank Hamilton Ulmer.
Christopher Hayes on China
The article is interesting throughout, here is one good bit:
The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.
The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.
And this:
Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain.
Assorted links
Which are the “safest” cuisines?
James Hinckley asks:
Which cuisine are you most likely to be satisfied with when dining out? Which disappoints you the least # of visits?
If you were at a shopping center you’ve never been to before and it has one restaurant of each cuisine and your goal was to simply be satisfied (you’re not looking to be blown away, you just don’t want a bad experience), which cuisine do you pick?
Korean is perhaps the safest bet, for two reasons. First, non-Koreans are not usually interested in the food. They might enjoy Bul-Gogi but there will be plenty of other dishes for Korean patrons and these will not be “dumbed down.” The lack of mainstream interest limits the potential for sell-out behavior on the part of the restaurant. Second, many Korean dishes, most of all the pickled vegetables, “travel” relatively well and do fine in a culture — the USA — which is not obsessed with fresh ingredients.
The most dangerous cuisine to try, in the United States at least, is Chinese. Your best working assumption is that the restaurant simply isn’t any good. Even in a Chinatown, such as in New York or DC, most of the restaurants aren’t very good. Inverting the two principles mentioned above puts you on a path toward figuring out why. Still, even in Paris or most of Europe for that matter, most of the Chinese restaurants aren’t very good.
I find also that (in the U.S.) Mexican restaurants are risky, Vietnamese establishments are relatively safe, and Thai places were traditionally safe but they are becoming riskier. I’ve never been to a bad Nepalese restaurant.