How many scary ideas can you fit into one paragraph?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Government officials say their rationing plan should help the country reach May, when seasonal rains are predicted to return. But even Chavez concedes the situation is serious. His past efforts to solve the problem have included sending cloud-seeding planes to produce rain with the help of Cuba.

I count at least seven.  The broader story, which has even more scary ideas, is here.  It seems quite possible that over seventy percent of Venezuela could end up without electrical power, within a year.

On the brighter side, they've finally devalued the currency.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Are good-looking staff bad for business?

2. Manhattan vs. Alaska.

3. Here is an old post, advice for budding economists, a reader asked me to rerun it.

4. Myths of the American Revolution (of general interest, don't hold me to endorsing these).

5. Was this movie subsidized?: "Sandrine Bonnaire is Hélène, a middle-aged housekeeper in a luxurious Corsican hotel, who one day sees a couple on a balcony exchanging erotic glances and seductive gestures over a chessboard. She is sexually aroused and tries to lure her husband into a similar situation by giving him a chess computer – but the attempt fails when he does not understand the connection between chess and erotic intimacy (really)."  Kevin Kline plays in his first French-speaking role.

6. How to warn people.

One data point on tax incidence

by  Tyler Cowen in

Warning: do not generalize.  Still, this is an interesting story:

City bankers will suffer little or no impact from the bonus supertax imposed by the government last month, according to a Financial Times poll of leading investment banks.

Most banks, polled in an anonymised survey, said they would absorb all or part of the cost of the one-off 50 per cent tax by inflating their bonus pools, even at the risk of irritating the government and their own shareholders.

The results chime with intelligence garnered by headhunters. “The tax is going to be 90 per cent absorbed by the banks,” said one senior recruitment consultant with clients in the City.

In many cases that will mean banks doubling bonus pools, with the cost of the tax borne by shareholders. Dividends, already under pressure as regulators force banks to retain earnings to boost capital, are likely to be hit, bankers concede.

Innovative Solutions to the Shortage of Transplant Organs

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Millions of people suffer from kidney disease, but in 2007 there were just 64,606 kidney-transplant operations in the entire world.

Today in the WSJ I discuss innovative solutions to the worldwide shortage of transplant organs from places like  Iran, India, Singapore, Israel and elsewhere.  One interesting bit I haven't blogged about before is routine removal of organs without the donor's or their families consent.  China?  No.  America.  It's been legal here for decades.

In a number of U.S. states, medical examiners conducting autopsies may and do harvest corneas with little or no family notification. (By the time of autopsy, it is too late to harvest organs such as kidneys.) Few people know about routine removal statutes and perhaps because of this, these laws have effectively increased cornea transplants.

Here is another bit on the shadowy definition of death:

Organs can be taken from deceased donors only after they have been declared dead, but where is the line between life and death? Philosophers have been debating the dividing line between baldness and nonbaldness for over 2,000 years, so there is little hope that the dividing line between life and death will ever be agreed upon. Indeed, the great paradox of deceased donation is that we must draw the line between life and death precisely where we cannot be sure of the answer, because the line must lie where the donor is dead but the donor's organs are not.

In 1968 the Journal of the American Medical Association published its criteria for brain death. But reduced crime and better automobile safety have led to fewer potential brain-dead donors than in the past. Now, greater attention is being given to donation after cardiac death: no heart beat for two to five minutes (protocols differ) after the heart stops beating spontaneously. Both standards are controversial–the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant from a brain-dead donor in 1968 was threatened with prosecution, as have been some surgeons using donation after cardiac death. Despite the controversy, donation after cardiac death more than tripled between 2002 and 2006, when it accounted for about 8% of all deceased donors nationwide. In some regions, that figure is up to 20%.

More on markets for organs, presumed consent, and point systems at the WSJ,

Critique of transhumanism

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one sample point:

First, that the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to confront the repeated implosions of the religion of Reason into romanticism and mysticism, and develop more sophisticated and nuanced defenses of rationality.

And this:

…while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.

Etc.  I thank Kyle Munkittrick for the pointer.  Here is my previous post on transhumanism.

Burning books in Wales?

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is, therefore, genuinely shocking to learn that book-burning is taking place in south Wales. Pensioners in Swansea are reportedly buying books from charity shops for just a few pence each and taking them home for fuel. With temperatures plummeting and energy costs on the rise, thick books such as encyclopaedias are said to be particularly sought after.

I am not sure how firm "reportedly" should be taken.  The full story is here and I thank Michael Bracken for the pointer.

Large industrial enterprises in the late 19th century

by  Tyler Cowen in

By the time of Appo's first incarceration in 1874, Sing Sing was a sprawling, seventy-seven-acre industrial complex, simultaneously a "great human cage" and "a leviathan" factory complex…Inside, horses and wagons moved higher and thither, ship masts towered above the quay walls, and freight trains thundered through the prison grounds.  In the age of industry, wrote another observer, Sing Sing was a "vast creative emporium."  It was arguably the largest manufacturing complex in the country, if not the world.

The size of Sing Sing's labor force dwarfed those of most American factories.

That's from Timothy Gilfoyle's excellent A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York.

My favorite things Florida

by  Tyler Cowen in

Was Tom Petty correct to think he was cursed by the critics for sounding so "normal"?  I'd rather listen to Tampa Red or Cannonball Adderly.  You can list many people who spent winters in Florida, or died there, but they don't quite count.  Ernest Hemingway had a close enough tie to Key West and I favor his short stories over his novels.  Zora Neale Hurston is still worth reading.  Carl Hiaasen is true Florida but I've never finished one of his books.  Juanes lives in Miami and he has five or so very good pop songs, maybe more.  Celia Cruz ended up there too and I suspect many other Latino musicians did as well.  In sum that list probably would be very impressive.  Purvis Young is a good "Outsider" artist.

Many excellent movies are set in Florida.  Where do I start?

Body Heat.  The underrated Wild Things.  Key Largo.  Contact.  Deuce Bigelow.  Ace Ventura (a favorite).  Various space launch movies.  The superb Ulee's Gold.  Parts of Midnight Cowboy.  Didn't Elliott Gould and Robert DeNiro end up there every now and then?  I feel there are additional noir movies and parts of gangster movies.  I Dream of Jeannie was set there.

Miami has long been one of my favorite American cities and I like Tampa for its dumpiness.  Naples is boring.

Evidence from India on neighborhood diversity

by  Tyler Cowen

Sharon Barnhardt, who is on the job market from Harvard, reports:

This paper provides experimental evidence on whether religiously diverse neighbors affect attitudes about another religious group and/or preferences for inter-religious living. I exploit a natural experiment in a large Indian city in which Hindus and Muslims were randomly assigned units in a public housing complex with physically distinct "clusters" of four units. The lottery generates exogenous variation in the degree of ethnic diversity across clusters within the complex, which is rare among adult households. I conduct an original survey of 1363 households focusing on attitudes about members of the other religion and willingness to live together. To overcome concerns about self-presentation bias, I also measure implicit attitudes via an Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a representative sub-sample. My estimates demonstrate location influences interactions in that individuals spend significant time with others in their cluster. Increased proximity and interaction, in turn, affect attitudes. Greater exposure to Muslims (the minority group) improves Hindus' explicit attitudes about Muslims by 0.25 to 0.40 standard deviations, depending on the measure, and increases their willingness to live with Muslims. Paralleling this, I observe significant reductions in implicit bias (0.20 to 0.57 standard deviations) among Hindu children. While I observe no significant effects for Muslims, the overall effect is a convergence of attitudes across religious groups. As India expands public housing for the poor to accommodate rapid urbanization, deliberate mixing of religious groups can be a way of improving attitudes toward the religious minority.

You can find the paper, along with her other work, here.

The trials of Tony Judt

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is an excellent piece, excerpt:

The standing ovation was tremendous. "I was initially shocked by the disjunction between his intellectual capacity, which is completely undiminished and in many respects unequaled, and the physical degradation," says Richard Wolin, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who was in the audience. "But after five minutes, I lost sight of any physicality and focused on his words and their importance." He adds, "It was one of the most moving scenes I have ever witnessed."

Here is my previous post on Tony Judt.

The theory of optimal fines

by  Tyler Cowen in

A Swiss court has slapped a wealthy speeder with a chalet-sized fine – a full $290,000.

Judges at the cantonal court in St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland, based the record-breaking fine on the speeder's estimated wealth of over $20 million.

A statement on the court's Web site says the driver – a repeat offender – drove up to 35 miles an hour (57 kilometers an hour) faster than the 50-mile-an-hour (80-kilometer-an-hour) limit.

Here is the full article and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.