My favorite things Spain, music

by  Tyler Cowen in

I need to do this country in pieces, starting with music:

Classical guitarist: Segovia, starting with his recordings of Bach.  It’s not just amazing technique, these are some of the best musical interpretations of Bach by anyone playing any instrument.  They are what I call lifetime choices for one’s collection.

Spanish pianist, playing Spanish music: Alicia de Larrocha is the obvious choice.  Her Albeniz and Granados recordings remain unsurpassed. 

Composer: Varese sounds much better live than on disc.  I’ve seen Amèriques twice and both were experiences to remember; here is a bit on YouTube.  Chailly and Boulez understand the music very well but the sounds and textures and rhythms simply don’t all come through if you’re not there.  (Addendum: Whoops!  Varese was born in France.)  The number two pick is tough but Rodrigo is underrated by many serious listeners, in part because of his exposure through classical pops.  Try his solo guitar pieces and throughout keep him in mind as a precursor of ambient music.  Tomás Luis de Victoria is an underrated Spanish Renaissance composer.

Cellist: It’s hard not to pick Pablo Casals, who had extraordinary depth in his phrasing.  I still feel duty bound to point out that most of his recordings are unlistenable, if only because of the scratching.  The Bach is of historic importance but for actual pleasure his Schubert is your best bet.  Most of all the recording of the String Quintet.

Album about: Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain.  One of my three or four favorite Miles CDs, so an easy pick.  Admittedly the move toward an "acoustic-electric" sound does not appeal to all jazz fans, so this album remains underappreciated.

Opera singer: Lots of riches.  Placido Domingo is a good pick though you could argue for many other names as well.

Popular music:  Help!

Flamenco: I love it in small clubs but not on disc or even in mid-sized university music halls. 

The bottom line: There are plenty of peaks but overall I am struck by the unbalanced nature of the distribution.

Many people embarrass themselves over Fidel Castro

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one menagerie, with Brad DeLong parrying ably.  A simple checklist would start with the question of whether an apologist has visited both the Dominican Republic and Cuba.  And a non-communist Cuba could have done much better than the DR.  It is a fascinating place for visitors, but right now the quality of life in Cuba isn’t close to that of the DR or for that matter Honduras, the second-biggest Latino mess in the hemisphere.  While we’re at it, let’s not forget northern Mexico or even central Mexico.  It’s time to stop apologizing for communist dictatorships; are you really so taken with the idea of confiscating property as to overlook decades of tyranny, impoverishment, and human misery?  Yes I am familiar with the UN social indicators; I say you need to visit each of these countries, preferably speaking Spanish, and then report back to me.

Why no Industrial Revolution in China?

by  Tyler Cowen in

John Darwin gives it a shot:

The best answer we have is that it [Kiangnan and China] could not surmount the classic constraints of pre-industrial growth.  By the late eighteenth century it faced steeply rising costs for food, fuel and raw materials.  Increasing population and expanding output competed for the produce of a more or less fixed land area.  The demand for food throttled the increase in raw cotton production.  Raw cotton prices probably doubled in the Yangtze delta between 1750 and 1800.  The demand for fuel (in the form of wood) brought deforestation and a degraded environment.  The escape route from this trap existed in theory.  Kiangman should have drawn its supplies from further away.  It should have cut the costs of production by mechanization, enlarging its market and thus its source of supply.  It should have turned to coal to meet the need for fuel.  In practice there was little chance for change along such lines.  It faced competition from many inland centres where food and raw materials were cheaper, and which could also exploit China’s well-developed system of waterway transport.  The very perfection of China’s commercial economy allowed new producers to enter the market with comparative ease at the same technological level.  Under these conditions, mechanization — even if technologically practical — might have been stymied at birth.  And, though China had coal, it was far from Kiangnan and could not be transported there cheaply.  Thus, for China as a whole, both the incentive and the means to take the industrial "high road" were meagre or absent.

In other words, who really knows?  The excerpt is from Darwin’s new book After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, which should be read by anyone…who…reads books with titles like that.  It is most interesting on the Indian and Arabic collapse of the 18th century and on fitting the Russian conquest of Central Asia into the more general history of European imperialism.  I didn’t find any revelations in the book, but it was consistently interesting and readable throughout.

A simple ethical conundrum

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me.  I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver.  I explained someone had left it there.  Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being.  But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn’t.  But wait, maybe I couldn’t have gotten the purse to the woman very easily.  But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down.  But wait, isn’t it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place?  But wait, what is the default point for defining "in the first place"?  But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab?  But wait, isn’t a purse really really important?  But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?

What I really think of the new popular economics books

by  Tyler Cowen in

I recently published an article in the Swiss arts magazine Du on the wave of popular economics books.  Yes I am an economist but I am also interested in the implicit philosophies and theologies of these books.  My piece is in German and not on-line but here are a few bits from it.

About Freakonomics I wrote:

The implicit theology of Freakonomics is that of original sin. The book is full of stories of liars: “people lie, data don’t” can be taken as the book’s motto…

Levitt and Dubner seek to puncture naïve optimism. It is the reader who needs reforming, and the proposal is to drive naivete out of our systems. We must recognize original sin (recall the bite into the apple on the book’s cover), give up on utopian dreams, and stick to what can be proven by science. That means an acceptance of ongoing human depravity, but Freakonomics goes further. It preemptively protects us against encountering that depravity and lying in our own lives. We have been warned, and we need no longer fear disappointment from our encounters with the real world.

It should come as no surprise that Dubner – the one who actually wrote the book – also penned an entire book about his personal theology. Dubner is ethnically Jewish but his parents had converted to Catholicism and raised him as a Catholic. Over the course of his life he rediscovered his Jewish heritage and religion and chronicled that process in his fascinating Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief. It is theology, Dubner’s main obsession, which gave him the background to write a popular economics book that touched so many Americans.

And how about Tim Harford?

Harford’s voice is always gentle, sometimes cynical, and usually whimsical and reassuring in his language. He points to the ironies of life. He is hardly one to deny that people lie, but such peccadilloes are a sideshow rather than the center of his moral universe. We still can make our way in the world and carve out a small piece of personal happiness and perhaps a small bit of virtue as well. Harford often reminds us that hedonism has its place in human affairs; his latest book opens with a discussion of the prospect of “a rational [you-know-what].”

In other words, Harford serves up British secularism rather than American original sin. Harford’s “Dear Economist” column…views human foibles as inevitable yet endearing; in Harford’s world no judgment is ever too harsh or too one-sided.

As an economist, Harford seems more interested in “invisible hand mechanisms” than are Dubner and Levitt. Freakonomics informs us that what appears to be ordinary is in fact full of corruption. Harford’s Undercover Economist is keener to show that the apparently corrupt can, at the macro level, lead to entirely acceptable and indeed sometimes humane results.

There is much more, here is one final bit:

Popular economics books reveal their true colors most clearly when they talk about sex. In Freakonomics sex is not holy but rather sex and reproduction lead to the birth of criminals…For Harford sex is a slightly naughty pleasure, and a pleasure to be mocked, but at least it is a real pleasure; this American reviewer again cannot help seeing the British tinge of his work.

Northern Rock has been nationalized

by  Tyler Cowen in

The media here seem more shocked than I am.  But imagine — a country dedicated to liberal economics (more or less) nationalizes one of the largest firms in its most vibrant economic sector.  Martin Wolf has a good piece on the event.  The real question is whether the UK (and other countries) will feel compelled to move to a system of regularized depositor liquidity rights and larger deposit insurance guarantees.  Right now British depositors receive a lower guarantee, both de jure and de facto, and can wait for months for access to their funds from a failed bank; read more here.  For all its drawbacks and screwy incentives, arguably the biggest advantage to deposit insurance is simply that it makes bank nationalizations unlikely.  Simply letting the bank fail is not always a credible alternative, because of contagion effects, bank runs, and the simple workings of democracy.  The bank did face an offer from Richard Branson but it seems that the numbers did not add up and the government would have been left holding the bag anyway.  Felix Salmon adds commentary.

Book Forum: Harford and Kevin Grier on Cities

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Kevin Grier at Kids Prefer Cheese continues our book forum on the Logic of Life with a discussion of The World is Spiky.

Here is my summary of Tim’s argument. Cities are expensive, and that
expense is above and beyond paying the necessary rents to gain access
to their unique amenities. Cities are marked by knowledge spillovers, a
positive externality (don’t get mad Bryan)
where human capital grows faster when one is around more humans. And
the internet, rather than reducing the positive effects of cities on
productivity, actually enhances them. Thus, rather than subsidizing
rural areas, perhaps we should consider subsidizing cities.

Luckily
for Tim and his prospective book sales, he tells this story in a much
more entertaining way than I just did. But I still have some questions,
suggestions, and quibbles.

The claim is made that salary
differences don’t match up with cost of living differences and the
reason for this is knowledge spillovers, but it is not spelled out
exactly how that would work. An alternative seems to me that zoning
restrictions create these big rents and pre-existing property owners
are sucking a lot of the consumer surplus out of people with high
valuations on cool experiences…..

Tim discusses
“failing cities” and describes (correctly I think) why people still
live there, but gives no explanation for why they failed if indeed
cities produce these positive externalities. There is no discussion of
some of the very biggest cities in the world; Mexico City, Lagos,
Jakarta. It would be nice to know where the argument works, where it
doesn’t and how to know which is which…

More here.

The Power of Vouchers

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Many studies of education vouchers have looked at the achievement of children who are given vouchers and who transfer to private schools.  Generally these studies have found small but meaningful improvements (e.g. here and here).  A voucher program, however, is about much more than transferring students from lousy public schools to better private schools it’s about creating incentives to improve the public schools.

Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship Program rated schools.  Students at schools that received an F in multiple years became eligible for a voucher that allowed them to attend a private or higher-rated public school.  In Feeling the Florida Heat? (ungated version) a paper sponsored by the Urban Institute Rouse et al. look at what happened at failing schools.

…we find that schools that received a grade of “F” in summer 2002 immediately improved the test scores of the next cohort of students, and that these test score improvements were not transitory, but rather remained in the longer term. We also find that “F”-graded schools engaged in systematically different changes in instructional policies and practices as a consequence of school accountability pressure, and that these policy changes may explain a significant share of the test score improvements (in some subject areas) associated with “F”-grade receipt.

Thus, this paper shows two things.  First, that the test scores of the students in the public schools improved when vouchers gave the schools better incentives to perform.  Second, at least some of the improvement comes from changes in how students are taught.  The author’s note, for example:

…we find that schools receiving an “F” grade are more likely to focus on low-performing students, lengthen the amount of time devoted to instruction, adopt different ways to organize the day and learning environment of the students and teachers, increase resources available to teachers…

It is not true that "nothing can be done to improve the schools."  Incentives matter.

Notice that Florida’s program worked even though the program was very weak.  It offered vouchers only to students in the worst schools and only after those schools received F grades in multiple years.  The vouchers were relatively small and could not be topped up.  In addition, the program lasted only a few years before it was declared unconstitutional by Florida’s supreme court.

A true voucher program would be national, would not discriminate among students, would offer funding equal to that spent on students in public schools and would be permanent. Competition in such a system would be more intense and even more productive than in Florida’s program.

It’s an Election, not a Revolution

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the title they gave my latest NYT column.  Excerpt:

To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself
into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure,
the next president – whoever he or she may be – may well extend health
care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic
problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to
stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising, no
matter who becomes president or which party controls Congress. China is
now a bigger carbon polluter than the United States, so don’t expect a
tax or cap-and-trade rules to solve global warming,
even if American measures are very stringent – and they probably won’t
be, because higher home heating bills are not a vote winner. A
Democratic president may propose more spending on social services, but
most of the federal budget
is on automatic pilot. Furthermore, even if a Republican president
wanted to cut back on such mandates, the bulk of them are here to stay.

Yes, the election does matter. Even small differences on
economic issues affect millions of Americans. But the record of the
Bush administration should prove sobering to all those who expect the
American political economy to turn around in the next four years.

Many
conservative and libertarian economists supported President Bush,
thinking they would be getting policy drawn from the work of Milton Friedman
and Martin Feldstein, two respected market-oriented economists.
Instead, in economics, the Bush years have brought an increase in
domestic government spending, and some poorly-thought-out privatization
plans. For all the talk of an extreme right-wing revolution, government
transfer programs like Social Security and Medicare have continued to grow. And despite big mistakes involving the Iraq war, Mr. Bush wasn’t punished by voters in 2004.

There is much more, and it is a more political column than I usually write.  My final conclusions:

And if you’re still worrying about how to vote, I have two pieces of
advice. First, spend your time studying foreign policy, where the
president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a
much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.

And there are points I could not cover for reasons of space, such as the constraining need to provide an AMT fix, or the ability of a party to sound more intelligent when it is out of power.

Addendum: Here is coverage from Mark Thoma and commentators; do they support or contradict Mark’s last sentence?  And here is commentary from John V.