China fact of the day
If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China’s eighth largest trading partner…
That is from Jeremy Haft’s cheesy-looking but at times interesting All the Tea in China: How to Buy, Sell, and Make Money on the Mainland.
Tyler on UFOs
Discover Your Inner Economist has lots of great insights. But this one Tyler gets all wrong.
Small changes in incentives can make a big difference in our beliefs. For instance, UFO sightings are down dramatically in the last decade…I think [one factor is] cell phones and cell phone cameras.
"The spaceship was in a no-call dead zone. And you didn’t snap a picture?"
…The story is suddenly a little harder to swallow. Most of all, it is harder to fool oneself, not just one’s spouse and friends.
I mean really. Why jump to conclusions? OBVIOUSLY the aliens know we have cell phone cameras now.
iPod music listening
Carrying around my iPhone, I listen more to an iPod than before and I’ve upgraded the music collection on my iPod.
I suspect that iPods encourage musical nuggets which are short, to the point, and complementary to adrenalin. I’ve heard the ? and the Mysterians song "99 Teardrops" more often in the last week than in the preceding last year.
The iPod means we listen more on the go, and with background noise, so the music should have energy. iPod listening also brings more frequent interruptions, which discriminates against longer pieces. Unlike with a CD player there is no particular reason to listen to a whole album straight through and what’s an album anymore anyway?
The curmudgeonly side of me worries a little. What about slowly enfolding, architectonically subtle musical structures? I love LaMonte Young, Pandit Kumar, and Andrew Violette, but thery’re not on my iPod. I also resent that now my brain is more likely to expect music to be fun, though often I would rather hear music that is good for me.
I’ve read that classical music is more popular on iTunes than in music stores; I wonder if the preference is for arias and energetic movements of snappy symphonies, or if the iTunes purchase doesn’t end up very active on the iPod.
A loyal MR reader asked for mbaqanga recommendations for iPod; start with The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Mahlathini (best without the Mahotella Queens), and Township Jazz n’ Jive; the last is not exactly mbqanga but you will love it anyway.
Who should control the IMF?
Here is a typical smart person’s thought about the IMF; the intro to the article reads:
When the IMF was a monitor of borrowers’ policies, dominance of the IMF
Board by creditor countries was natural, but an institution whose main
role is to facilitate global consultations and arbitrate currency
disputes needs a more balanced shareholder structure.
I again find myself drawn into a "public choice" response rather than an "optimization" response. I read the above sentence as stating the problem the IMF faces, not stating a solution. The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan support the IMF in large part because they control it. For the U.S. in particular the IMF has been a relatively good deal. You don’t have to think the IMF is especially effective (I don’t), but the institution allows for pre-arranged contributions to bailouts and pre-arranged coordination. Having a dominant hand in a multilateral institution works better for U.S. policymakers than having to assemble consortia on the spot, or explaining to some countries on a nation-to-nation basis that they won’t get any help.
If China and India had a significant voice in the IMF, what would they want? It’s not clear, and that is part of the problem. The U.S. isn’t about to stop paying its "country club dues," but when new upgraded members might someday form a blocking coalition, I’m not sure America will step up its contribution either.
Worse than Viruses
Public computer surfaces are reservoirs for methicillin-resistant staphylococci.
The role of computer keyboards used by students of a metropolitan
university as reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci was
determined. Putative methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant staphylococci
isolates were identified from keyboard swabs following a combination of
biochemical and genetic analyses. Of 24 keyboards surveyed, 17 were
contaminated with staphylococci that grew in the presence of oxacillin
(2 mg l-1). Methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), –S. epidermidis (MRSE) and –S. hominis
(MRSH) were present on two, five and two keyboards, respectively, while
all three staphylococci co-contaminated one keyboard. Furthermore,
these were found to be part of a greater community of
oxacillin-resistant bacteria. Combined with the broad user base common
to public computers, the presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci
on keyboard surfaces might impact the transmission and prevalence of
pathogens throughout the community.
Thanks to Monique van Hoek for the pointer.
Markets in everything, telekinesis edition
If you’ve ever wanted to remotely access the files on your mac’s hard
drive through the Safari application on your iPhone (and who hasn’t?)
then you’ll want to download Telekinesis from the genius mind behind Quicksilver.
Here is more. I haven’t tried the download but from appearances it even seems to be one of those free markets with a dollar price of zero…
Why Choose This Book?
I began by exposing the myth that imprecision, slowness, and noisiness are liabilities of brain function, "bugs" in computers.
That is from Read Montague’s new and notable Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions, an in-depth look at neuroscience and the brain.
Why doesn’t capitalism flow to poor countries?
Why isn’t 30 percent of the economics profession working on this problem? Di Tella and MacCulloch tell us the following:
We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor
countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries.
Thus, it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn’t flow to poor
countries. A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more
widespread in poor countries, reduces more the electoral appeal of
capitalism than that of socialism. The empirical pattern of beliefs
within countries is consistent with this explanation: people who
perceive corruption to be high in their country are also more likely to
lean left ideologically (and to declare support for a more intrusive
government in economic matters). Finally, we present a model explaining
the corruption-left connection. It exploits the fact that an act of
corruption is more revealing about the fairness type of a rich
capitalist than of a poor bureaucrat. After observing corruption,
voters who care about fairness react by increasing taxes and moving
left. There is a negative ideological externality since the existence
of corrupt entrepreneurs hurts good entrepreneurs by reducing the
electoral appeal of capitalism.
Here is the paper. Here are non-gated versions.
China thought of the day
China has given us a ton of stuff in exchange for t-bills. If they
expropriate US or other rich country FDI, the US cancels their claim to
the t-bills and we get the stuff for free. That is to say, China’s huge
reserve holding of dollars is just collateral against any appropriation
of the FDI being done there.
Here is more.
My favorite things Colorado
These do not spring easily to mind:
1. Public building: The new Denver art museum, by Daniel Liebeskind.
2. Fiction: I reject Kesey and Michener, so I’ll go with Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, an excellent piece of fantasy/science fiction.
4. Movie, set in: The Shining comes to mind.
5. Music: I can’t pick John Denver and while I enjoy big band, I think that Glenn Miller, once you get past a few tunes, is overrated. Jello Biafra, of The Dead Kennedys, is an obvious pick here; don’t forget "Holiday in Cambodia."
6. Wild card: Ted Mack, remember his amateur hour? It was a favorite show of my father’s.
The bottom line: Eh. Toss in Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks and it is still Eh. I hope the green chili is good.
Creative Destruction?
I met a friend recently that I hadn’t seen since high school. I told her I was an economist. "Oh," she said in the nicest possible way, "I’m surprised, you were so creative in high school." Sigh.
What’s actually annoying about bad customer service?
Jane Galt posts her thoughts on Sony Vaio customer service. I bought a Sony Vaio a few months ago, at the recommendation of a friend. Fortunately [it now seems] it arrived at the Best Buy with a broken drive and I never had the chance to lay my hands on it. It was only last week that they gave me my money back. Best Buy wouldn’t give me the computer, and Sony wouldn’t accept the damage claim from Best Buy rather than from the customer.
I see two especially frustrating elements in bad customer service. First, the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are already turned on, anticipating that a longstanding problem — lack of a computer — was going to be solved. The resulting disappointment is especially acute, much worse than before you try to fix the problem.
Second, we don’t like the tension of not knowing when the problem will be solved, or when being put on hold will end. Going to the dentist with certainty stresses me less than some chance I might have to go.
I try to manage the former problem by not getting excited until the product has been working for at least a day. That means I remain a bit emotionally flat in some spheres of commercial life and I don’t go out shopping enough or with enough gusto. I try to manage the second problem by mentally capitalizing the worst case customer service outcome I can imagine. That means when something goes wrong I toss in the towel too quickly. Sometimes I just buy a new item rather than solving the problem with the old one, or working to get a refund.
On this matter, Natasha believes I am crazy, yet I persist in my ways.
Ten politically incorrect truths?
Alumni economics
Alumni with kids are 13 percentage points more likely than alumni without kids to give in any year. The tendency to give rises slowly–by three more percentage points total–through kids’ early teens. At about age 14, as mom and dad see their kid’s algebra and composition grades, they decide whether he or she will apply to the alma mater.
Here is much more.
Markets in everything: The Reading Cave
Why not read among your books?
