Magazine fact of the day
Of Vogue‘s 840 pages, 727 are ads, or: 13 percent is editorial.
Here are counts for other magazines.
Best Sentence on Labor Day
On a popular wristwatch a painted image of Mao Zedong waved his hand jerkily with every second. ‘He is not greeting you,’ the vendor grinned. ‘He is saying goodbye.’
From Colin Thubron’s excellent Shadow of the Silk Road.
Larry Craig
Maybe I spent too much time reading Thomas Schelling (is that possible?), but my main reaction was to wonder how such trade-maximizing conventions get started. I mean the foot tapping, the leaning of the bag against the stall door, and the like. In the early stages of such conventions, I can think of a few paths:
1. Signal something harmless and non-incriminating and hope for reciprocation. Yelling out a clue-laden but non-obscene word or phrase ("Fire Island!") might do the trick. But if the other guy yells back "Berlin!", is that enough to act upon?
2. Signal something costly — incriminating or at least potentially embarrassing — in the hope of establishing your credibility as a social transgressor. Of course you hope to get a costly signal in return. A step-by-step escalation of the signals then follows, so that trust in mutual social deviance is established prior to action. At some point in the escalation the action is worth the risk because the other person is sufficiently out on a limb. As the years pass the escalation of signals proceeds more quickly and cuts out some of the intermediate steps.
3. The initial gains from trade are so high that most participants are willing to run the risk of the blatant signal and the equilibrium is inevitable.
4. High-demanding and reckless "pioneers" establish the convention, by signaling blatantly but against their self-interest. Nonetheless the convention becomes relatively safe once it spreads to many traders.
5. The convention never become so safe (ask Larry Craig) and so we have a separating equilibrium in which only the risk lovers manage to trade in this public environment.
My intuition suggests a mix of #2 and #4 as the most likely paths.
How might you signal your willingness, to a friend, to make fun of or gossip about a common acquaintance?
George Clooney
The critique is that some mothers mix dirty water with the dairy formula and give their kids diarrhea, from which some of these kids die. (Yes I do know that breast milk has other health benefits for kids.) But isn’t dehydration the major mechanism of death? Forgive me for sounding flip, but shouldn’t Nestle be advertising its dairy products to mothers with kids with diarrhea, so then they wouldn’t die? (Even dirty water is better to drink than doing nothing and usually it will save most lives, or so I have been told.) Isn’t one way of looking at the problem that Nestle doesn’t have good enough ads?
Flipness aside, Clooney supposedly is not being paid for his role in the movie, so
his behavior raises a question for utilitarianism. Should not a saint
work for evil causes, earn more money, and subsidize good causes with
the surplus? I believe this depends on whether good or evil causes rely more on cash flow, whether good or evil causes invest resources more productively toward their good or evil ends, and the costs of mixing good and evil causes in terms of symbolic values.
Under what conditions will evil causes end up manned exclusively by good people?
Assorted links
2. Imaginary books, not created by us I might add
3. A new economics and food blog, including (but not just) reviews of Baltimore
4. Judy Chevalier’s debut NYT column covers my colleague Thomas Stratmann and GMU graduate student Michael Makowsky
Your Money & Your Brain
The subtitle is How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich, written by financial journalist Jason Zweig. I enjoyed the content of this book, and would recommend it as a stimulating source of ideas, but with some caveats:
1. The new science of neuroeconomics cannot help make you rich, unless perhaps you have inherited a scanner and then rent scanner time to neuroeconomists (often $500 an hour or more). Or unless you decide to simply buy and hold, compared to some other foolish plan you might have had.
2. I would have liked more emphasis on the tentative nature of neuroeconomics results. Most studies have very few data points (see #1). And if human choice is so context-dependent — a message of the book — doesn’t it matter if people are removed from their normal environment, told they are in an experiment, and subjected to a loud, whirring machine?
3. What does it really mean if some part of your brain lights up? Who really knows?
4. The book mixes in results from experimental economics, surveys, and field experiments. That’s fine, but if the neuro results had to stand alone on an open plain they would look less impressive.
I genuinely am a fan of neuroeconomics, but in the interests of science it’s important not to oversell it.
How many books should you start?
So few other people sample books en masse, yet the practice strikes me as trivially correct. If I buy a book the odds that I finish it are reasonably high, certainly above fifty percent. Why spend the money on a longshot? (Btw, "What I’ve Been Reading" is almost always books I have finished, otherwise why report them?) But when I troll a public library for free books, which I do virtually every day, should I pick up only those books I expect to finish? No, I slide further along the marginal benefit curve and that means I grab lots of books with relatively small but positive expected values.
Yesterday’s haul from Arlington Public Library included You Never Call! You Never Write!, and Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening, neither of which I expect to finish (though I will if I love them). The real question is should I read more on-line book reviews (which are free), or do my own "reviews" by pawing the free book for a few minutes?
What are other reasons not to sample? Are library trips so costly? Are you so confident in social filters relative to your own judgment/pawing? Have blogs outcompeted book pawing? Is the goal of reading simply to share impressions with other people, and there is little uncertainty about what are the hot-selling books?
I say go and grab, go and grab, go and grab.
Nothing at all like this happens in our house
Darrah’s absence has brought something else into bold relief — our attachment to certain routines. Without her youthful energy buzzing through the house, some of our longtime habits have deepened — calcified? — into codgerlike rituals. The one that most amazes and amuses Dan and me takes place after dinner, when we…amble into the living room…put on a CD and pick up our respective books (these days, usually from the library). We then commence what we call "parallel reading."
…Once in a while, one of us will notice the rutlike quality of this activity and say something to the effect of, "What have we come to?" Then we’ll chuckle, sip some tea, and go back to our books.
That is from Karen Stabiner’s The Empty Nest: 31 Parents Tell the Truth About Relationships, Love, and Freedom After the Kids Fly the Coop. For one thing, I don’t drink much tea.
Prediction tools
Predict How Long You’ll Live (Northwest Mutual)
Predict Your Child’s Due Date (Ayres)
Predict Your Child’s Adult Height (University of
Saskatchewan)
Predict Justice Kennedy’s Vote (Ayres)
Predict Your Next Move in Rock-Paper-Scissors (Chappie)
There are many other prediction tools here (do click), from Ian Ayres. Ayres requests that you email him other prediction applets, which he will add to the page. Ayres also has a new book out, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to be Smart; it is highly readable and also endorsed by Steve Levitt.
I thank Ian Ayres for the pointer.
The best sentence I read this morning
It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream.
For more, here is Will Wilkinson on whether we are entering a new populist era.
The economy of airports
Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport: – a shower – clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it) – daylight – an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT – nutritious but not too heavy food – a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.
And here’s what is generally available: – Gucci – Chanel – l’Occitane – Bodyshop – Lacoste – Nike – a few plastic seats – McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.
…in an airport, foot traffic is very high, and space is at a premium. So you should expect to see things that go at a very high volume (McDonalds) or things that are very expensive per-inch-of-display-space, such as Gucci. Showers and napping capsules do not meet either criteria.
Think of airports as temporary prisons for the wealthy, and the luxury good offerings as reflecting the extreme value of their attention. Airports will sell goods which are complements to that attention, which is otherwise so hard to get.
Compare the Brooks Brothers outlet at Reagan National Airport with the Brooks Brothers outlet at Tysons Corner Mall. I’ll predict the former devotes a greater percentage of floor space to eye-catching, easy-to-buy, easy to try on items, such as ties.
Another prediction is this: in countries (cities) where the wealthy people are not hurried (relative to shop hours), there should be fewer luxury goods in the airports. What are examples? Monaco? Nice? Spain? London would seem to be an example of extreme hurry.
And what does Air Genius Gary Leff say?
Addendum: The genius weighs in.
Mobility
Here is the latest, by Emmanuel Saez and co-authors; note I linked to this paper yesterday but now I have looked at it. Here is one key sentence:
…we find that short-term and long-term mobility among all workers has been quite stable since the 1950s.
To disaggregate, note that mobility among males is down but mobility among females is up. (It is an interesting question whether there is a causal relationship here.)
Here is a much earlier MR post on mobility. Keep these links in mind next time you hear claims about mobility, and I believe you will hear many such claims in September. See also our earlier posts on Dalton Conley, who shows just how much inequality is generated within the same family.
It should be noted that Saez is the leading measurer of income inequality and also a critic of such inequality. In his view a constant level of mobility means that no force is offsetting ongoing inequality. I believe he would likely read his own paper as support for a left-wing view of the world and as support for concern with income inequality. He would not read his work as reason to dismiss the mobility issue. My view differs, as I worry about mobility — can a hard-working person get ahead? — but I do not worry about inequality per se, nor do I require of mobility that it overturn a particular level of inequality.
Simone Dinnerstein
Is her Goldberg Variations as good as The New York Times (and other reviews) claims? In a word, yes.
No, it doesn’t displace Gould for me, but it comes closer than I thought any recording ever would. I’m a Gould-obsessive who resold his Murray Perahia recording of the Goldbergs in disgust and never cottoned to the Goldbergs on harpischord (Egarr and Hantai being truly splendid, however). Schepkin, Hewitt, Tipo, and Peter Serkin were fine, Pi-hsien Chen was surprisingly good, Schiff wasn’t so hot, and then there was Gould, Gould, Gould. After Gould, I was just as happy to hear the transcribed version for guitar.
Now there is another.
The Ethics of Book Abuse
"Every reader has a personal ethic for how to treat a book, a morality for what can and can’t be done to the physical object." Is dog-earing a page a violation of the sanctity of the volume, or an easy way to hold your place? What about highlighting key passages, or writing notes in the margins? Or even (gasp!) throwing out an old book you don’t want anymore?
Here is the link. I do not believe that books have rights, Nozickian or otherwise. I am most likely to rip up travel books if only to minimize my carry burden. But I don’t write in books because I wish to discover new ideas — and not just my old ideas — each time I open them up. Dog-earing pages is useful because you can go back to old books and see how far in them you read and then decide you really shouldn’t give it another chance after all.
Here is a story about book left behind in hotel rooms, including a list of the top 10 most abandoned titles (UK).
Hopeless ideas to which I retain an irrational attachment
Historic India, before Partition, is an idea which appeals greatly to me. Not the colonial version, but the idea of an independent and tolerant India of larger scope.
I don’t pretend to have any good arguments for this idea, and I understand (to some degree) how and why it fell apart. I also understand that historic India was itself not very unified. That is in part what makes my attachment irrational, and perhaps the irrationality is part of the attachment itself.
What is your hopeless idea to which you retain an irrational attachment?