How Cooking Made Us Human

by  Tyler Cowen in

How much can you hate a book that has sentences like these?:

Instinctotherapists, a minority group among raw-foodists, believe that because we are closely related to apes we should model our eating behavior on theirs.

In fact I liked the book — How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham — very much.  Here is a good review of the book.  The one sentence version is:

We are cooks more than carnivores.

I also liked this fragment:

…a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…

Here is a strange and wild critique of Instinctotherapy.

The gender of Twitter relationships

by  Tyler Cowen in

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.
Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users
follow each other. This "follower split" suggests that women are driven
less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for
reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that
females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise
45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we
cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000
strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly,
an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another
man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different
tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.

I read that on Twitter from…a woman whose tweets I follow.  I don't know who she is or, for that matter, how I ended up following her.

Charities in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Have you ever wondered what percent of charities involve actual positive externalities?

Susan spent months in front of her computer on MyFreeImplants.com,
a Web site where women who want breast augmentation can connect with
“benefactors” willing to contribute to the cause, sometimes a dollar at
a time. In May she was one of two Las Vegas women who went under the
knife on donations alone.

Do they also offer naming opportunities?  Here is the story.  The thanks go to a loyal MR reader, who by the way is now blogging again.

The renegade guru

by  Tyler Cowen in

For some non-obvious reason I thought of Bryan Caplan when I was reading this article:

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.

Instead of leading a monastic life, Osel Hita Torres now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha.

Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. "I never felt like that boy," he said.

The story is here.  Successive photos are here.  And:

At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin.

He is still revered by the Buddhist community although here is a bit more on the embarrassed responses.  I wonder how many gurus come to such realizations but do not speak up.  Does living in Spain have an effect?

Why aren’t more theatrical plays on DVD?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many plays, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, are made into movies and they end up on DVD in this manner.  But why don't they just film Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (recommended, by the way; it's playing at the Folger and it's one of the classic plays of our time).  A look at Amazon doesn't yield much.  Nor does a search on "Edward Albee."

I can think of a few possible factors:

1. It wouldn't be very good.  (This doesn't stop most of what is put out on DVD.  Furthermore the highly complex genre of opera on DVD works just fine and has become the industry standard.)

2. There wouldn't be much of an audience.  Yet you could sell memento copies to people who saw the plays, a few plays on DVD might hit it big, and in any case they wouldn't cost much to produce.  There are plenty of niche products on Netflix.

3. It would squash the demand for live performance.  Really?  Most people don't go to the theater anyway.  Those who do, in this age of 3-D cinema and TiVo, presumably enjoy live performance in a manner which is robust.  It is more likely that DVD viewing would stimulate demand for the live product.  Besides, they put these plays out in book form and no one thinks that is a big problem.

None of these answers seem to work.  So, to repeat the question, why don't they put more theatrical plays out on DVD?

Addendum: Could it be they are holding out for the sale of movie rights and that profit is maximized by restricting alternative viewing options?

Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain

by  Tyler Cowen in

That's the new and interesting Hugh Thomas book about the leading Spanish businessman of the 20th century, Eduardo Barreiros.  Barreiros entered into car manufacturing, but with the Cuban government as his business partner:

Luis Morente, more subtly, thought that the Cuban government wanted to use Eduardo to see whether Communism could collaborate with capitalism as it has done in recent years in China.  Businesses that were half-private, half-state-controlled (empresas mixtas) followed.  But there were innumerable difficulties: first, the government would select personnel to work with Eduardo according to their political position; second, the "second-rank executives" often found themselves being analysed by their subordinates; absenteeism was not denounced and indeed not considered as such; in Pinar del Rio, workers had to be allowed off to work in the tobacco harvest; incentives and productivity played no part.  The party, the Bank of Cuba, the unions, the provincial government were always intervening; energy supplies were irregular; parts were delivered very slowly; no one cared if supplies deteriorated before delivery; and in 1988, after a hurricane, the factory was flooded.  All these things needed Eduardo's continual attention.

It should be noted that, relative to the standards of the Cuban economy, the venture was a success.

Auctions and Politicians

by  Alex Tabarrok in

David Warsh has an excellent column on economists, auctions and the politicians who oppose them: 

…the US Department of Transportation earlier this month canceled plans to auction landing slots for New York’s three busiest airports. The Bush administration had sought the measure, hoping to cut delays at the chronically congested airports (and, of course, raise some much-needed cash). The airline industry lined up against the proposal, so did Democratic congressmen. Incumbent airlines will continue to profit; frequent travelers will continue to suffer delays.

Similarly, the banking lobby, among the nation’s strongest interest groups, has so far successfully opposed Treasury Department attempts to put up for bid banks’ questionable (now “legacy”) assets. The reason is simple: when the asking price is, say, 90 cents on the dollar and the bid is closer to 40 cents, no manager will willingly take part in an auction that seems certain to lower book values.

[Similarly]…President Obama campaigned on a promise to auction the [carbon] permits. But a coalition of Midwestern and Southern Democrats teamed up to alter the bill, and when its language was released last week it turned out that fully 80 percent of the permits would be given away at first to electricity utilities and their big industrial customers…

Nevertheless, Warsh is optimistic about the ability of economic engineers to create value with more sophisticated and widespread auctions.  Read the whole thing for developments on the academic front.

Divorce and Crime Victimization

by  Alex Tabarrok in

While paging through the statistical tables of Criminal Victimization in the United States I found some interesting data on victimization, marriage and divorce.  The rate of victimization for violent crimes (per 1,000 persons aged 12 and over) for never married and married males is as follows:

  • Never Married Males: 45.0
  • Married Males: 12.3
Clearly, married males are older and they have settled down, usually in places away from crime hot spots.  Thus the fact that the rate of victimization for married males is much lower than for never married males is no surprise.  What did surprise me is that divorced males have rates of victimization about as high as for never married males:
  • Divorced or Separated Males: 44.2
The same pattern is even stronger for females:
  • Never Married Females: 38.4
  • Married Females: 10.3
  • Divorced or Separated Females: 49.4

The patterns are suggestive of how large a difference one’s choices can make for criminal victimization.  That is, one hypothesis to explain the data is that singles congregate in urban, high crime areas and they go out at night to bars and other high crime locations.  Married individuals move to low crime suburbs and stay home with popcorn and Netflix.  The divorced, however, move back to the cities where the singles are and they head out at night to try to mate again.

An alternative hypothesis is that the individuals who tend to get divorced have personalities or behaviors which make them more likely to get divorced and more likely to be victims of crime: a drug user, for example, is likely to have a higher probability of divorce and a higher probability of being a victim of crime than a non drug-user.

How many other hypotheses can you think of to explain the data?  What tests would you suggest to distinguish hypotheses?