When to say “I love you”
No, this question applies not at the beginning of the relationship, but after a few years or more. Sure, you love the person but this is economics and we think at the margin. Why did you say "I love you" right now rather than two minutes ago? I can think of a few reasons:
1. Anxiousness and a desire to reassure oneself in the face of self-doubt.
2. Irritation at the other person, leading to #1.
3. Desire to manipulate the other person by first making him or her feel compliant and secure.
4. Being overcome by suddenly stronger feelings of love, perhaps because of a Proustian reminder.
5. The simple feeling that too long has passed since having said "I love you," presumably combined with the belief that the words are uttered rarely enough to still have potency. You need to signal you are keeping track of such things.
6. The sex was either very good or very bad, see #1 and #4.
7. One has work or chores to do, and is hoping to create a distraction of some kind.
8. To announce that a conversation is over.
Natasha asks whether in a marriage one hears "I love you" more or fewer times than is optimal. We both think "fewer" is usually the answer, although given the low cost of generating the message, and the possibility of reaping gains from trade, it is not entirely clear why this equilibrium persists.
Japan bleg
How expensive is it to visit Tokyo these days? I understand PPP indices and know all the tales of $200 melons and beef protectionism. But how much does the place actually cost? When I visited in 1992 I stayed in a small but comfortable business hotel, traveled by public transportation, ate sushi, and had a relatively cheap trip. Is that old mental picture of mine now a delusion? Should I instead focus my travel attention on the worst currency manipulators?
Practice makes perfect?
Technological innovations, especially the use of laparoscopic
procedures [for stomach surgery], have made for considerable gains in safety and efficacy.
While the operation is still dangerous in some circumstances – one
study found that for a surgeon’s first 19 bariatric operations,
patients were nearly five times as likely to die than patients that the
surgeon later operated on – the overall mortality rate is now in the
neighborhood of 1 percent.
That is from Dubner and Levitt, the full story offers much more, mostly about weight loss, and here is further discussion.
Recommended Christmas and holiday gifts
Suitability as gifts means the book is a short one, the items will signal elevated taste, they are at least reasonably entertaining, visually appealing, and they are unlikely to be given by others as gifts unless of course your social circle reads MR.
1. Fiction: Stephane Audeguy, Theory of Clouds. The conceptual foreign novel which got lost in the shuffle of the American fiction market.
2. Popular Music: The View, Hats off to the Buskers, from Scotland, this is musically superior pop and they still have room to get even better.
3. Classical music: Either William Byrd, Laudibus in Sanctus, beautifully recorded, or John Adams, The Dharma at Big Sur/My Father Knew Charles Ives, and yes I spent twenty years as a Johns Adams skeptic. In the last few years he’s raised his music to an entirely new level.
4. Gadget: I still use my iPhone almost every day and I can no longer imagine not having one. Mostly I surf web sites and blogs while waiting in lines, or read email. I’ve yet to make a phone call with it.
5. DVD: I watched through Planet Earth as quickly as I could. Yana then took the box up to college, if you need another testimony. If your loved one doesn’t merit an entire DVD box, I thought Away From Her was the best movie of the year; sadly the first-rate No Country for Old Men won’t be ready on disc in time.
6. Single song on iTunes: Anthony and the Johnsons, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. The key here is to pick a song on an album you won’t otherwise buy or you won’t otherwise think of.
7. Crazed economist idea: Buy someone a book of stamps. It has the efficiency properties of a cash transfer (who doesn’t need stamps?), yet if you choose an attractive issue it will show (a little) more thought than money alone. And hey — you had to stand in line to get it, or endure their ugly web site, and at a monopolistic institution at that.
Finally, it is often better to give experiences rather than possessions, and if you don’t know what your wife wants email her sister or best friend and ask.
Cambodia
Cambodia…basically has one industry, the garment
trade, which employs about 300,000 people (almost all of them young
women), and probably supports about 10% of the population directly and
indirectly. Almost everyone else makes their living in agriculture,
with a small government elite, a smaller tourism community, and a tiny
small business sector…Cambodia’s garment trade is incredibly dependent on
special treatment from America, where it sells almost all its wares.
In other words, true free trade from China, for the United States, would devastate the Cambodian economy. If you wish to consider the strongest arguments for protectionism, they usually involve weighing the interests of one poor country against another, and not the interests of a poor country against a rich country. Here is the full discussion. Related lessons are that comparative advantage won’t necessarily yield pleasant price and wage ratios and that producing anything of value is truly, truly difficult. Given Cambodia’s previous problems, one also has to wonder whether mass migration to Vietnam is the best option available, provided of course that is possible.
What does Iraq cost?
Here is my piece for the Sunday Washington Post on the costs of the Iraq war. It is simply argued, but originality is not always a virtue. So far I’ve received more email about it than any other article I wrote this year and the paper edition isn’t even out yet.
Cold Skin
The Japanese pihlosopher Musashi once said that only a select few appreciate the art of war. Gruner is one of them. The battle is defensive at night. Amorous forays with the mascot fill his days. And it is hard to tell which of the two activities impassions him most.
That is from Albert Sanchez Piñol’s Cold Skin, a Catalan novel which is well known in Europe (I discovered it browsing a Swiss bookstore) but obscure in the United States. It captivated me right away. I cannot quite call it science fiction, but I would recommend it to science fiction and horror fans who are looking for something serious and conceptual and literary, and who feel that only scraps remain on the table…
Trudie and Prudie meet
Here is the link to the video. Emily Yoffe, who writes the Prudie column at Slate.com, was extremely gracious and charming and articulate. She vouched for the central role of self-deception in human affairs, and in the videocast she had an excellent anecdote about Steven Landsburg and his proposal to improve happy marriages. Will Wilkinson was the moderator.
Here is an associated ten minute podcast, with me. You can subscribe to Cato podcasts on iTunes here.
Why are there no grocery stores in poor neighborhoods?
Well, there are some, you will find Ralph’s all over Los Angeles. But why aren’t there more? (This query is posed here, here, and here, among other places.) Factor #1 in my view is lack of cars. Living in an inner city has its downsides, to say the least, but at least you don’t have to buy a car. Yet the modern grocery store is designed for car transport, both how you get there and how you get the groceries away and of course the radius of advertising. With fewer cars per capita the tendency is for smaller, more local stores, which is precisely what we see in poor neighborhoods. Not surprisingly poor people are most likely to have cars in LA, and thus most likely to have grocery stores there as well. For that matter real grocery stores are not all that common in wealthy but relatively carless parts of major cities, such as Manhattan.
Crime is surely a factor as well, what do you all think and what other natural experiments come to mind?
Repugnance is Repugnant
Many people find the idea of selling human organs for transplant to be repugnant which is why Roth argues that we should focus more on improving efficiency through kidney swaps. I’m all in favor of swaps and have also suggested that one argument in favor of no-give, no-take rules is that they are ethically acceptable to more people than organ sales.
Nevertheless, I think Roth assumes too quickly that repugnance is a constraint to be respected rather than an outrage to be denounced and quashed. People’s repugnance at inter-racial dating or homosexual sex is no reason to prevent free exchange – the same is true for organ donations. Repugnance itself can be repugnant.
Is it not repugnant that some people are willing to let others die so that their stomachs won’t become queasy at the thought that someone, somewhere is selling a kidney?
What people think repugnant can change rather quickly with changes in the status-quo. Adam Smith said that in his time there were "some very agreeable and
beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of
admiration; but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is
considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public
prostitution." What were these talents that people in Smith’s time thought akin to prostitution? Acting, opera singing and dancing. How primitive, how peculiar.
In the not to distance future I think people will look back
on the present and think us
primitive and peculiar. Letting thousands of people die while organs that could have saved their lives were buried and
burned. So much unnecessary pain; all for fear of a little exchange. How primitive, how peculiar. How repugnant.
Why stupid questions are important
"What’s the main thing one learns visiting Asia?" That’s the first question that comes to my mind when reading Megan McArdle’s travel thoughts from Vietnam (one example here, note it is my stupid question, not hers, another more humorous example here). Almost every word in the question is stupid — "main"?, "thing"? — or it is easy to point out that Asia is a huge, diverse and many-splendored place.
We nonetheless do most of our thinking in terms of stupid questions, whether we like it or not. It is important to turn stupid questions to our advantage, because in fact that is the main thing we’ve got. While visiting Asia I have learned:
1. Population density really can simply crush the environment, and such density is a more common state of mankind than even a New Jersey boy might imagine,
2. Asians are in general far, far friendlier in their home environs, which is perhaps a question of emotional security,
3. It is possible to have billions of people, and massive stretches of land, both urban and rural, with virtually no major problems of street crime (what is in fact the most dangerous Asian country to wander around in?), and
4. A mere collective act of will could make the food better in many, many (non-Asian) countries.
I might have read these points in books, but I would not have learned them had I not been to Asia and asked myself some stupid questions. Most of all I’m impressed by just how much population density matters.
Claims I made to David Levy yesterday
The richness of early twentieth century economic thought remains to be fully appreciated by historians of ideas. Pigou, Wicksteed, Pareto and many others led a behavioral revolution. rooted in Smith and Jevons. Veblen’s best work was splendid, but it was less of an outlier than is usually thought. Duesenberry and Scitovsky drew directly on these earlier traditions. "Freakonomics" was common, albeit with lower-tech statistics. The notion of economics as household behavior dates from Aristotle and was never lost. Marshall was in reality an institutionalist. Experimental economics comes from William James and Edward Chamberlain. The real question is how so much got lost in the 1940s and onwards. Contemporary economics is oddly conservative, moving back to the 1900-1930 period in its emphases.
China re-estimate of the day — whoops!
The Asian
Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China’s
economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The
announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China’s size
using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when
the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this
year, China’s economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than
previously stated……The number of people in China living below the
World Bank’s dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m – three times larger
than currently estimated.
Here is more.
Game theory and balance sheets
What’s really the problem these days?
The single best thing that could happen would be for the true magnitude
of the losses suffered by banks and other exposed parties to be
revealed and put in the P&L. Until what happens, fear of getting
stuck with the hot potato makes banks unnaturally unwilling to extend
credit against the kind of collateral that they would not have thought
about twice accepting at the beginning of the year.
Here’s the source. This is an important game to understand. Think of bank managers as being collectively averse to admitting a loss, if only because they might be blamed for that loss. So at first no one admits losses. Even though the market knows the losses are there, the market just doesn’t know exactly where. But then the market has no accurate valuations for some asset classes. Those asset classes can’t serve as collateral because just about any result — relative to an unevaluated base — could count as a loss and we’ve already seen that managers are loss-averse. Plus dealing with hard-to-value assets is difficult in any case.
The simple lesson is that bad news can be good news. "Predictability of environment" is a public good across managers. Once managers admit their losses, market liquidity can spring back to life and we can avoid a credit crunch.
Once managers admit their losses, that is.
China fact of the day
When next summer’s Olympics roll around, the Beijing Weather Modification Office will be poised to intercept incoming clouds, draining them before they get to the festivities. No fewer than 32,000 people
nationwide are employed by the Weather Modification Office — "some of
them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers" loaded with cloud-seeding compounds.
Here is the story.