Book fact of the day

Are ethicists more moral than the rest of us?  This result should warm the heart of Richard Posner:

I noted that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics
books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and
non-ethics books from leading academic libraries).  Missing books as a
percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for
non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.

There is further data analysis at the link, hat tip to Bookslut.

Hard to make this stuff up department

Daniel Gross’s best argument for FDR is that FDR was better than Hitler. 

Roosevelt scared investors and businessmen? Did he scare them as much as, oh,
Stalin, who controlled one of the world’s largest economies and was expanding
his influence? or as much as Mussolini? Or as much as the fascist government of
Japan? Or as much as Hitler, who was confiscating property of Jewish
investors and businessmen?

So there you have it.  FDR not as bad as Hitler, therefore, FDR a good president.  Compare with Bryan Caplan’s actual argument.

Bogota thoughts

Unlike Mexico City and Rio, most of the shops don’t have private security guards or much in the way of security systems.  Bars on home windows are unusual.  I haven’t heard many sirens.  Solo women walk around many parts of town.  Fear of civil war, kidnapping, and paramilitary guerrillas is no reason to postpone a trip.  From a tourist’s point of view, Bogota is more secure than most other Latin American cities.

There is less glamour here than I expected, and most of the city is solidly working class, lower middle class.  People are well dressed but in a relatively formal way; there is little sartorial individuality or flair.  Dark clothes, especially black, are the default style, but not in a Will Wilkinson cool hipster sort of way.  Rather the message is "it rains here a lot and it is cool and foggy and we have endured centuries of violence, so why wear floral pink?"  The bowler hat, however, is now passe. 

Bookstores and libraries are everywhere, and it is common to see people reading or carrying books.  The shops display their serious books, not the junk.  The museums are the best in South America, for both content and presentation.

Bicycling is a big deal, and the bus system is well-developed to an extreme.  The water is potable.  The green hills around the city are attractive, the colonial part of town has wonderful colors and houses, and the modern architecture is getting better.

Colombianos are remarkably gracious and friendly.  There is nothing like isolation to make people love foreigners.  Does having a bad international reputation make people nicer to compensate?

You have to utter "good day" to the guard each time you enter a new room in a museum.  People open doors for each other.  No one is loud.  It all feels vaguely right-wing.

The local soup mixes shredded chicken, avocado, potato, corn, capers, cream, and herbs for a tasty blend.  So far the food doesn’t thrill me; too many restaurants remain in the meat and potatoes stage; being in the Andes has never been good for any cuisine, except of course for their hearty soups.

The people look surprisingly homogeneous; I expected more Caribbean types and indigenous.  That said, the Turks run the textile trade and there are plenty of Chinese (so-called) restaurants.  Indian features are common, but blended into a broadly Spanish mix.  No one is very tall.

How can such a nice place be in the midst of a civil war and guerrilla uprising?  Why do leaders in the highest reaches of government secretly work with the paramilitaries?  Does every radio station in the country play Juanes, and how long will their Tower branches last?

Here is a good reading list on politics and institutions, but do any of these pieces explain what I am seeing?

Did World War II end the Great Depression?

Joseph Cullen and Price Fishback write:

We examine whether local economies that were the centers of federal spending on military mobilization experienced more rapid growth in consumer economic activity than other areas.  We have combined information from a wide variety of sources into a data set that allows us to estimate a reduced-form relationship between retail sales per capita growth (1939-1948, 1939-1954, 1939-1958) and federal war spending per capita from 1940 through 1945.  The results show that the World War II spending had virtually no effect on the growth rates in consumption that we examined.  This contrasts with Fishback, Horrace, and Kantor’s (2005) findings of about half a dollar increase in retail sales associated with a dollar of New Deal public works and relief spending.  Several factors contributed to this relative lack of impact. World War II spending often required a conversion of plants designed for civilian good production into military factories and back again over the 9 year period.  Substantially higher federal tax rates that were paid by the majority of households imposed much stronger fiscal drags on the benefits of the spending.  Finally, less of the military spending was earmarked for wages and use of locally produced inputs, which reduced the direct stimulus to the local economy.

Here is the paper, here are non-gated versions.  My understanding has long been that wartime orders from Europe, by 1940, provided the decisive turning point for the American economy.  So if WWII did end America’s Great Depression, it was not through the traditional mechanism of massive domestic fiscal stimulus.

Addendum: Here is James Hamilton on the Great Depression.  And Brad DeLong replies to critics, but if we are going to count as monetary policy we must recognize 1937-8 as a disaster which cut off a recovery.  And Paul Krugman chips in, see the comment by Robert Waldmann, I am myself skeptical that a liquidity trap was in place.

Second addendum: The authors have another good paper on crime and social spending during the New Deal.

Not Normal on the New Deal

Readers will not be surprised to know that I am not normal.  Indeed, I have not been normal for a long time as this post from 4 years ago attests:

Roosevelt and the Great Depression

I was amused to see Conrad Black writing with shock:

Jim Powell of the Cato Institute (cited approvingly in a recent column by Robert L. Bartley) argues in a new book that FDR actually prolonged the Depression!

Of course, Powell is correct. Imagine, increasing the power of
unions to strike and raise wages during a time of mass strikes and mass
unemployment. Imagine thinking that cartelizing whole industries
thereby raising prices and reducing output could improve the economy.
Not everything Roosevelt did was counterproductive – he did end
prohibition (although in order to raise taxes) – but plenty was and
worst of all was the uncertainty created by Roosevelt’s vicious attacks
on business. (See, for example, the work of Bob Higgs especially this important paper and historian Gary Dean Best’s overlooked classic Pride, Prejudice and Politics.)
Business investment failed to recover because business people
legitimately feared a regime change like that which had occured in
Germany and Italy. Sound extreme? Roosevelt himself threatened/promised
this in his first inaugural:

…if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and
loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline,
because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership
becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our
lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a
leadership which aims at a larger good… I assume unhesitatingly the
leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined
attack upon our common problems….in the event that the Congress shall
fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the
national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear
course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress
for… the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded
by a foreign foe.

My favorite things Colombia

1. Literature.  Here is my previous post on Garcia Marquez; I forgot to mention Love in the Time of Cholera.

2. Painter: Fernando Botero.  Most of the Boteros you are likely to see are very weak, but his early work can be stunning; at ArtFair in Miami I saw a watermelon still life from the 1950s.  Rest assured, he was once a painter of genius, but I cannot find a convincing reproduction on-line.  I don’t think he sold out, rather he felt compelled to paint as much as possible, I don’t know why.

3. TV show: Betty La Fea, I have yet to see the U.S. "Betty the Ugly."  Here is what the actress really looks like, or try this one.

4. Music: I don’t feel ready to judge Aterciopelados until I see them live.  Yana has played plenty of Juanes for me, it is good Latin pop with hooks.  Afro-Colombian music is noteworthy, here are some styles.  I’ve never found a really good CD of Cumbia.

5. Movie: I thought Maria Full of Grace was overrated — too predictable, yes cocaine mules run great risks — but it is the only one I know.

6. Continental Liberator: Simon Bolivar.

7. Blogger and sociologist: Fabio Rojas, occasional guest-blogger here at MR.  Here is his page on art and music, recommended.

8. Random category: Sofia Vergara ought to count for something.  Often she dyes her hair dark to look more Latina for U.S. roles.

The bottom line: My knowledge here is patchy, and that is one reason why I am visiting.  By the way if you live in Bogota, do drop me a line.

I genuinely wish to know

Matt Y. writes:

…the forces of progress are fated to an arduous generational struggle against the health care industry [TC: not just private insurance?] and there’s not much to be done about it.

Now I can understand the view that market forces are doomed to failure in the health sector and that government is the best of a bad set of choices.  That is not my opinion, but I grasp why someone might believe that.  I wish to ask all you single-payer advocates — in absolute terms — how good (bad) do you think it will be?

Let’s rate "the paper clip industry" as a 9 out of 10.  Paper clips are pretty cheap and usually they work.  Let’s rate the better federal agencies as a 6.5 out of 10.  Let’s rate HUD as a 2.5 out of ten.

How will national health insurance do, keeping in mind that U.S. doctors do not wish to have their wages cut, Americans want the right to choose their doctors, and the U.S. is a huge, messy, decentralized, federalistic country with lots of cheats and massive, hard-to-eradicate inequalities at many different levels.

I give it about a 3.  How about you?

And what are your views on the likelihood of today’s flawed system improving without drastic single-payer reforms?

Services as gifts

A friend of mine told me about a gift she’d just received that’s a
perfect example of this kind of generosity.  Her friend told her, “For
Christmas, I’m going to replace every burned-out lightbulb in your
house.”  And she did.  She went around the house, took out every
burned-out bulb, went to the hardware store to buy replacements, and
put fresh bulbs in every empty socket.

That is from The Happiness Project.  I told Yana that for my birthday this year I want a working TiVo system, that means time on the phone to their help desk, we will see what I get.

Bonuses lead to more wage inequality

Thomas Lemieux strikes again:

An increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using a bonus, a commission, or a piece rate.  In this paper, we look at the…growing incidence of performance pay on wage inequality. The basic premise of the paper is that performance pay jobs have a more competitive. pay structure that rewards productivity differences more than other jobs.  Consistent with this view, we show that compensation in performance pay jobs is more closely tied to both measured (by the econometrician) and unmeasured productive characteristics of workers.  We conclude that the growing incidence of performance pay accounts for 25 percent of the growth in male wage inequality between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, and for most of the growth in top-end wage inequality (above the 80th percentile) during this period.

This economist deserves…um…a bonus.

Does politics reflect personality?

A new article in Psychology Today suggests the following:

†¢    Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color.  Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional.  Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
†¢    Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I’m the decider."
†¢    Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
†¢    Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
†¢    Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
†¢    Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
†¢    When people are prompted to think about death–a state of mind  psychologists call mortality salience–they actually become more conservative.
†¢    Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

I can assure you my room is messy, and I wonder if more finely grained categories would have been useful.